What a Wretched Mess!!!
Written: Aug 25 '07 (Updated Aug 25 '07)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: cinematography, Linney's performance
Cons: Everything else, including the stolen plot points and the moronically insipid dialogue.
The Bottom Line: Only see this film if you've got 90 minutes to live, and you want it to feel like a lifetime. They should show this film at Gitmo.
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| bilavideo's Full Review: The Nanny Diaries |
Every now and then, a film comes along that's the cinematic equivalent of water boarding. If you can leave, get up and go. If not, it's a twisting, writhing ordeal, sort of like a date with Private Lyndsey England and her dog chain.
When first conceived, I'm sure The Nanny Diaries was a whole lot better. The book, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (former nannies themselves) told of an NYU student who takes a job as a nanny to help with expenses during her senior year. What first seemed like a no-brainer (our heroine is majoring in Child Development) turns into an ordeal as she ends up working for a cold-and-controlling Manhattan socialite. Part of the book's appeal was its "tale of two cities" as its heroine juggled two worlds: her life as a starving student (with best friends, Sarah and Josh) and her entry into the crazy world of upper-class snobs with every advantage except the common sense to enjoy what they had.
But in the wake of girl-fantasy hits like The Princess Diaries, Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada, this film is a trainwreck of elements - pulled from other films - which, like its Manhattan socialites "has everything" except a soul. Dual writer-director partners, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (who wrote and directed this film, along with American Splendor and TV's "Wanderlust") give us a promising idea, beautifully shot (thanks to their cinematographer, Terry Stacey, who also shot American Splendor and "Wanderlust"). But it's a soulless machine that copies the plotline of The Toy and crosses it with The Pacifier, while attempting to incorporate elements from The Princess Diaries, Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada.
The film begins with Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson) narrating how she got here. She's about to have a confrontation with the nanny cam hidden in a teddy bear - not unlike Ben Stiller's famous fit with the "spy cam" in Meet the Parents. For reasons that look like an attempt to copy The Devil Wears Prada, Annie is now an NYU graduate, rather than a starving student. This takes away the economic necessity that drove the plot of the book, replacing it with an identity crisis. But why would someone who majored in Early Child Development not have worked as a nanny before, and why would she now be interviewing for a job at Goldman Sachs? And why would Goldman Sachs, which is arguably the premier global investment firm, schedule an interview with someone who doesn't know who she is or what she wants?
The answer, of course, is somewhere between Pinnocchio's nose and Michael Jackson's face, where one little "fix" requires another, then another, till you end up with something as ugly as Dick Cheney's shotgun on a misty Texas morn. Annie, it turns out, did not major in Early Child Development but in Finance - with an Anthropology minor. This allows Annie to be completely in over her head when dealing with four-year-old Grayer (Nicholas Art), the son of Manhattanites "Mr. and Mrs. X" (Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney). It also allows Annie to couch everything in terms of anthropology, particularly the tribal customs of the natives, not unlike Lindsey Lohan's narration in Mean Girls.
In fact, The Nanny Diaries is basically Mean Girls grown up, that is, when it's not copying plot points straight out of The Toy or trying to create a relationship between Annie and Mrs. X (Linney) who is as cold and twisted as Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada - but without the redemptive speech about how nobody understands or appreciates fashion for what it is. Maybe that's because there isn't a speech to justify the insanity of Manhattan's Upper East Side. Those people do what they do because they can. The closest this film comes to redeeming them is to show that each of these hateful people is driven by somebody else's cold, cruel abuse delivered at close range - and with a smile.
The casting in this film is more a coup of greenlighting than of genuine appreciation for the range and color of the actors' personalities. Johansson has a wonderful plainness that, mixed with her beauty, made her the perfect fit for Lost in Translation, Ghost World and The Man Who Wasn't There (the latter of which gets an inside joke when the nanny who ran off is named "Birdie"). But casting her as an Anne Hathaway knock-off limits what Johansson can do. Likewise, Giamatti, who has spent much of his career fleshing out panicky characters who are either ignored or on the ropes, is cast as a cold, narcissistic fat cat who flies to Chicago to work "on the merger" whenever things at home are not to his liking. It's perhaps a refreshing change for Giamatti but one that reduces him to spending the whole film as a Bob Balaban impression.
If there's a good performance here, it's that of Laura Linney, who has spent a fair amount of her career playing the responsible good girl, forced to deal with unreasonable or morally slippery people around her. Here, she gets to play against type, in a role that's somewhere between Meryl Streep's in The Devil Wears Prada and that of Joan Berkman, the critical and controlling mother and wife in Squid and the Whale (which generates another inside joke when she refers to four-year-old Grayer as "being difficult"). Linney's character is both fun to hate and easy to pity.
The bulk of my wrath is for the dialogue, which is so bad it belongs on TV. There is only so much cutesy banter I can stand, especially when the jokes are as soft as pudding and the wit is as dull as a plastic dagger. It's as if the writers (who also directed this mess) were more interested in turning something in, no matter how banal. This is a film whose chance encounter (saving Grayer from disaster) is a perfect match for its meet cute: Annie discovering "Harvard Hottie" (Chris Evans) - or his discovery of her, with her pants down and her t-back waving like a flag as she bangs on the front door, demanding that Grayer let her into the condo. There's no surprise here, just a lot of perfunctory, predictable, plot points that could have been penned by a monkey in the lobby - and probably better.
This film is a waste of talent, a waste of time and ultimately a waste of film. I've seen worse, but at the moment, none come to mind.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: Girl Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Everything
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Member: Bill Kilpatrick
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