LOCKED down in a celluloid prison cell marked “The Nanny Diaries” for 105 punishingly awful minutes, I was seconds away from crying “Attica” and leading a tactical assault on the projectionist’s booth when the words “The End” appeared on screen. I rocketed out of my seat as though wearing a jet pack.
The movie version of the novel about a working-class girl minding a spoiled Upper East Side tot is a comedic sinkhole, a dramatic tundra. Its would-be insights are clichés (Park Avenue matrons are fussy, snobbish control freaks) and each dilemma has the heft of a Tic Tac (will the nanny quit, or be fired from a job she doesn’t like or need?). The wraparound mystery, mentioned at the beginning to tantalize us till the end, is the question of why nanny comes to yell at a teddy bear. Fasten your seat belts for the answer!
Annie (Scarlett Johansson) is a bright college grad from a New Jersey suburb, where her mom is a nurse. The movie treats this upbringing like something from “Oliver Twist,” dressing Johansson from the trash bin behind the Goodwill and giving her normally golden locks a gangrene rinse.
Her mom wants her to enter finance, but she’s a dreamy anthropology major who keeps imagining New York types replacing the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History. Her takes on metropolitan mores are so outsidery, so spoon-sharp, that they could have come from any first-day tourist on the top deck of the red bus: She pictures society ladies Botoxing and upchucking, the men stockbrokering and golfing.
A clunky “comic” scene in which she is mistaken for a nanny (“I’m Annie.” “You’re a nanny?”) leads to employment with a rich Upper East Side family, or caricature thereof. The mother (Laura Linney) demands her precious 6-year-old be read to from the Wall Street Journal and, on his birthday, be entertained by French mimes; the barking husband (Paul Giamatti) keeps his lap warmed by female associates.
The rest is heavy rotation of three basic scenes: Nanny dealing with outrageous child-care demands while taming the shrieking kid; nanny listening to the rich couple arguing; nanny flirting with a neighbor (Chris Evans) she dubs – oxymoron alert – “Harvard Hottie.”
Annie is a bore (her best friend, played by Alicia Keys, has no detectable personality at all) whose most resonant conflict is the prospect of parting from the kid after she bonds with him, but so what? Every baby sitter does that.
Annie also will eventually have to admit to her mother that she’s been lying about having landed a finance job, but there wasn’t a plausible reason for her to lie in the first place (except that it leads to a sitcom-style scene in which Annie pretends to be living an entirely different life), and there are no consequences to her fib.
Only a single letter of the novel was of interest: X. Since the book’s authors hinted that they’d nannied for famous zillionaires, readers gobbled up their blind items about Mr. and Mrs. X. Now there’s no gossip value, no sense of peeking in on our betters, since the squabbling husband and wife are generic – Brand X.
I’d forgive the shallowness if the movie, written and directed by “American Splendor” directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, made me laugh. But its intended comic lines – picky Mrs. X’s “I can’t guarantee the beef here is
antibiotic-free,” Annie’s worried mother oozing, “Annie? An entire week has gone by and you haven’t called me!” – extinguish all mirth.
When things seem to be wrapping up, Annie and the X’s move their mutual complaint department to a beach house, at which point time, for me, actually began to move backward. Almost a quarter of the movie yawned before me. I yawned back. Still to come was lots of waiting for Annie to leave nannying, get her bland boy and float away beneath a giant umbrella like Mary Poppins. The word for this movie, though, is supercalifragilisticexpialatrocious.
THE NANNY DIARIES
Half a star
Needs changing.
Running time: 105 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity). At the E-Walk, the Orpheum, the Kips Bay, others.