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Nanny as a professor

There's no splendor to Diaries
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 5th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The devil wears Gap Kids. Scarlett Johansson hardly takes charge in Nanny Diaries.
The Nanny Diaries

Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
With Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Alicia Keys, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti

Experts on Chick Lit have been generating comparative studies on the merits of Lauren Weisberger’s fashionista send-up The Devil Wears Prada and Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’ The Nanny Diaries versus their film adaptations.
The consensus appears to be that Weisberger’s Black-is-the-New-Black Like Me was a middling effort that became a better movie — one memorably stolen by Meryl Streep as she-wolf editor Miranda Priestly. The opposite is held for The Nanny Diaries, which readers believe has been almost completely ruined by Hollywood.
Having skimmed Prada and not having read Diaries, I’m in no position to judge a literary competition between the two. As for the film versions, David Frankel’s Prada is far more engaging and entertaining than the lumbering Diaries that opens this week, though the talent behind the current film suggests it might have been otherwise.
Any book that took two writers to create should at least, in the name of fair play, have two screenwriters and directors to translate to film. Diaries was picked up by the husband-and-wife screenwriter/director team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini.
Though Berman and Pulcini are hardly household names, they were responsible for one of the best films of 2003, American Splendor. Their take on the life and work of underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar was a slice of brilliance, and offered a breakout role to kill for to the now-ubiquitous Paul Giamatti. It would be forgivable if one had anxiously anticipated the couple’s next project.
Unfortunately, the wait wasn’t worth it. Berman and Pulcini have taken what I understand to be a fairly searing satire on Manhattan’s elite and mulched it into a forced comedy-drama that is all-too-unctuously concluded with uplift. While the book apparently ends with a sting, the film is like a dutiful nursemaid, ladling on salve to those remaining in the audience.
Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson) is a smart young woman freshly graduated from university, who, rather than taking a position with a business firm in Midtown, veers off into the monied avenues of the Upper East Side to work as a nanny.
The idea of becoming a nanny merrily pops into her head one day in Central Park, while she sits sorting out her life. Annie races to save a young boy in the path of a cyclist, and finds herself strangely drawn to the rescued child. His mother, a stand-in for every young society matron in the neighborhood dubbed Mrs. X (Laura Linney), is grateful to Annie, mistakenly believing that she is a nanny.
Annie the nanny is soon ensconced in the X’s suite, where she quickly discovers that, yes, money does not buy happiness. The high-powered Mr. X (Giamatti again) is a negligent husband and father who is obviously having affairs on the side. Mrs. X is also neglectful of her little son, Grayer (Nicholas Art), who takes all of his despair out on the hapless Annie.
Annie stays on, however, as her greatest wish is to one day become an anthropologist — and what stranger culture is there to study than the American rich? But, as the abuse from her employers and their sprog intensifies, Annie tries to find a humane way of extracting herself. “My desire to be an observer of life was actually keeping me from having one,” our nanny-cum-professor finally admits to herself, in what is hardly an original epiphany. Can drama, with a few warm tears and correcting hugs, be far behind?
It was foolhardy to believe that you could hang an entire film on Johansson. To her credit, she is becoming less like animate porcelain, though she still acts primarily with her lips. Nonetheless, since her best work in last year’s The Prestige, Johansson has gained some maturity, and though her performance here can only be described as dull, it is at least dull in a new way.
Giamatti gently reins in the sleaziness of his Hertz in Shoot ’Em Up to create a perfectly despicable Mr. X, while R&B singer Alicia Keys puts in a strong performance as Annie’s best friend. Chris Evans, however, is wasted as the story’s stud.
As Streep commanded The Devil Wears Prada, The Nanny Diaries belongs to Linney as Mrs. X. This fine actress creates a firmly believable character, managing to reveal the aching human heart beating under her own Prada garb.
Still, The Nanny Diaries is sanitized satire, and way up past its bedtime.
 

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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