X (Paul Giamatti, overacting and basically miscast), an adulterous businessman, who in his first scene is heard but not seen. X (Laura Linney) and her precocious son Grayer, while attempting to avoid the formidable Mr. As nanny, she must cater to the every whim of Mrs. Choosing to duck out of real life, Annie accepts the position as a nanny for a wealthy family, referred to as simply “the X's.”Īnnie quickly learns that life is not very rosy or happy on the other side of the fence, or rather tax bracket. Through a serendipitous meeting in Central Park, Annie ends up in the elite and ritualistic culture of Manhattan's Upper East Side as remote as one can imagine from her suburban New Jersey upbringing.
#The nanny diaries cast movie#
The movie unfolds as a personal journal, with daily entries. A college grad, Annie goes through an early identity crisis, asking herself Who Am I What Am I Supposed to Do Incidentally, in the book, the character's name is Nanny, and that's the way she is addressed in the movie by her spoiled and ruthless employers.įresh out of Columbia University, she gets tremendous pressure from her decent, hard-working, future-oriented single mother, Judy (Broadway's Donna Murphy) to find a respectable position in the business world, although Annie would prefer to trade in her blackberry for an anthropologist's field diary. “Nanny Diaries” tells the story of the emotional and humorous journey of Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson in brown hair, looking downtrodden, for a change), a young woman from a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, struggling to understand her place in the world. Had she been younger by a decade, Meryl Streep, who gave a stupendous performance as the shrill (Anna Wintour-like) magazine editor in that picture, was born to play the upscale matron-suffering wife in the new film, though Laura Linney does a good job, too. The other film that “Nanny Diaries” brings to mind is the far superior and more stylish “The Devil Wears Prada,” also a chick flick set in upscale Manhattan and centering on a peculiar work environment. As their novel presented a scathing and hilarious portrayal of one typically affluent Park Avenue family, the media began a guessing game, “who's-the-book-really-about” While the authors insisted their book was purely fictional, it was written in such a knowing style and from the inside that it practically begged for this kind of speculation.Īs a movie, “Nanny Diaries” suffers from heavy reliance on first person voice-over narration (which, admittedly, is faithful to the source material), but it lacks the book's edgier, more critical tone, resulting in a fable, or fairy tale al la Mike Nichols' 1988 “Working Girl,” about a bright New Jersey working class girl who needs to find herself. premiere, the film will be shown at the Venice Film Festival, out of competition.Īs a book, “Nanny Diaries” caused controversy due to the fact that its authors, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, had spent a combined eight years working as babysitters in Manhattan, for over thirty families. Originally scheduled by the Weinstein Company for spring release, “Nanny Diaries” was then pushed back to early fall (September 7), but then moved back to August 24, presumably due to potential competition from the Russell Crowe-Christian Bale Western vehicle, the remake “3:10 to Yuma,” New Line's ultra-violent and pleasurably campy Clive Owen starrer, “Shoot 'Em Up,” and other films. End result is a sharply uneven work that never quite finds the right tone to depict its distinctive Park Avenue milieu, which in the book is treated as an exotic and esoteric site for anthropological fieldwork. For commercial reasons, Springer Berman and Pulcini might have been subjected to pressures to soften the book's more offbeat and darker notes.
Likely to divide film critics, this quintessentially New York serio-comedy is a compromised rendition of the 2002 satirical novel of the same title, published to critical acclaim, blockbuster sales, and even notoriety. The gifted writer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who created the original and edgy indie “American Splendor,” a highlight of the 2003 season, make a rough, not entirely successful transition to the big-budget, star-driven movie world with their follow-up “The Nanny Diaries.”