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Movie review: “The Nanny Diaries”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
The “Nanny Diaries” has a field day depicting one family determined to avoid facing a couple of particularly ruthless “bizarre social patterns” observed among New York’s elite Upper East Side families: benign child neglect and marital infidelity.
As an example of what the film contends is a wide-spread affliction, the family of Mr. and Mrs. X (how Annie identifies them in her “field diary”) and their son, Grayer (Nicholas Art), has too much money and not enough sense.
Mr. X (Paul Giamatti) is a lawyer who has long ago ducked out of the problem of avoiding a wife he has ceased communicating with. Mrs. X (Laura Linney) has ducked out of the pain of dealing with a husband who neglects and hurts her with mistresses and numerous trips out of town. He knows how to justify and defend what she knows are lies. She doesn’t want to rock the boat.
So, she immaculately and neurotically controls the worlds in which she believes she has power: her Fifth Avenue apartment and those parts of high society that mistake designer clothes as a sign of good breeding.
Another sign of good breeding is a child that is accepted into the right school, regardless of how poorly behaved he is. Into this world comes Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson) an idealistic graduate who is avoiding the world of high finance her business major/anthropology minor degree has supposedly prepared her for.
Annie doesn’t know who she is. All she knows is that a little boy picked her out one day in Central Park, and suddenly dozens of women were fighting over Annie like a Chanel handbag at a markdown sale. As the X’s’ nanny, Annie is in for unpleasant surprises trying to figure out who her employers are: a species that has not evolved far from red-in-tooth-and-nail-polish self-preservation and superiority.
While Linney steals the film with her acid portrait of a lovely lady with an ugly heart, Johansson gives a gratifyingly sensitive performance as a person with solid gold values, who even at her tender age can see that time is running—out for these people to discover and protect what are the true riches in their life. A Weinstein Company production, MGM release, rated PG-13 for language.
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