(Entertainment Weekly) -- The rich are getting richer, but that isn't buying them much love from the movies; it may only be upping the hatred.
In "The Nanny Diaries," based on Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus' "I was a yuppie nursemaid" chick-lit novel, Annie Braddock, a suburban New Jersey girl just out of college, falls into what is, for her, an innovative mode of delayed adulthood: She decides to spend the summer working as a nanny in New York City.
Annie has vague notions of becoming an anthropologist, but beyond that she has little idea of who she wants to be. Scarlett Johansson, with her guarded, people-pleaser softness and slightly morose carnality, plays her as a born observer, an unformed young woman who embraces her new job almost voyeuristically, as a window onto the adult world -- or, at least, a certain obscenely wealthy Manhattan sector of it.
Annie gets hired to look after Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art), the spoiled but basically sweet 5-year-old son of a couple she refers to simply as "the X's," who live just off Fifth Avenue in an apartment that is pure, sprawling, old-money-flavored real estate porn. Mrs. X (Laura Linney), a vainly prattling porcelain-doll narcissist, does nothing all day but shop, lunch, tend to her wall of designer shoes, and go to "meetings" with other social X-rays. They're mommies who don't want to be mommies -- or, at least, don't want to spend more than five minutes at it, apart from fretting over which private school their tot genius is going to get into (or, in the case of culinarily correct Mrs. X, whether Grayer eats tofu or peanut butter). They treat their kids as designer accessories.
Actually, Mrs. X does one additional thing: She complains -- a lot. Whatever Annie does, it's never good enough, and Mrs. X's way of addressing her simply as "Nanny!" is the ultimate demeaning sneer. She might be talking to a domestic robot.
"The Nanny Diaries" has nothing but sympathy for poor, put-upon Annie as she cleans up kiddie vomit in her upper-class prison, but it's less interested in her as a character than it is in the elite social pathology of the people she's working for. This is the same strategy that worked so well in "The Devil Wears Prada," which had the daring to portray Meryl Streep's editrix monster as a figure of artfully malign fascination. Laura Linney, a great actress, with an erotic danger Streep has never possessed, could surely have done something similar, but The Nanny Diaries turns her into a pale WASP zombie -- the Stepford Bitch.
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In "The Nanny Diaries," based on Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus' "I was a yuppie nursemaid" chick-lit novel, Annie Braddock, a suburban New Jersey girl just out of college, falls into what is, for her, an innovative mode of delayed adulthood: She decides to spend the summer working as a nanny in New York City.
Annie has vague notions of becoming an anthropologist, but beyond that she has little idea of who she wants to be. Scarlett Johansson, with her guarded, people-pleaser softness and slightly morose carnality, plays her as a born observer, an unformed young woman who embraces her new job almost voyeuristically, as a window onto the adult world -- or, at least, a certain obscenely wealthy Manhattan sector of it.
Annie gets hired to look after Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art), the spoiled but basically sweet 5-year-old son of a couple she refers to simply as "the X's," who live just off Fifth Avenue in an apartment that is pure, sprawling, old-money-flavored real estate porn. Mrs. X (Laura Linney), a vainly prattling porcelain-doll narcissist, does nothing all day but shop, lunch, tend to her wall of designer shoes, and go to "meetings" with other social X-rays. They're mommies who don't want to be mommies -- or, at least, don't want to spend more than five minutes at it, apart from fretting over which private school their tot genius is going to get into (or, in the case of culinarily correct Mrs. X, whether Grayer eats tofu or peanut butter). They treat their kids as designer accessories.
Actually, Mrs. X does one additional thing: She complains -- a lot. Whatever Annie does, it's never good enough, and Mrs. X's way of addressing her simply as "Nanny!" is the ultimate demeaning sneer. She might be talking to a domestic robot.
"The Nanny Diaries" has nothing but sympathy for poor, put-upon Annie as she cleans up kiddie vomit in her upper-class prison, but it's less interested in her as a character than it is in the elite social pathology of the people she's working for. This is the same strategy that worked so well in "The Devil Wears Prada," which had the daring to portray Meryl Streep's editrix monster as a figure of artfully malign fascination. Laura Linney, a great actress, with an erotic danger Streep has never possessed, could surely have done something similar, but The Nanny Diaries turns her into a pale WASP zombie -- the Stepford Bitch.
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
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