The quote-unquote mainstream fictional feature debut of directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini — who made the superlative documentary Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s, as well as the docu-fictional curio American Splendor, the story of disgruntled comics writer Harvey Pekar — The Nanny Diaries is a pleasant enough movie of attractive half-measures.
Scarlett Johansson‘s New Jersey-born heroine negotiating the perils of the urban jungle of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It tells the story of the emotional and often humorous journey of Annie Braddock (Johansson), a young woman fresh out of college and struggling to find her place in the world. Through a serendipitous meeting one afternoon, Annie fields an offer to become a live-in babysitter for a wealthy family. Equating nannying with “ducking out of life for a year,” Annie shruggingly accepts the position, only to be introduced into a surreal world of stressed-out extremes.
Berman and Pulcini’s imaginative, flight-of-fancy touches are given nice visual showcase in a few bits, including a sequence of satirical museum dioramas that opens the movie and a recurrent leitmotif involving red umbrellas, the most obvious of a handful of allusions to Mary Poppins. But sentiment generally gets the better of shrewd satire here. And what the movie sorely lacks is much push-back or astute, in-the-moment analysis and frustrated reaction from Annie herself. We’re told (repeatedly, by Annie’s mother) how brilliant she is, but she’s also a bit rudderless. That’s legitimate, of course — youthful ambivalence is the new naïve stridency — but the movie confines Annie’s learned lessons largely to omniscient, after-the-fact narration, and this dents our identification with her. Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, Mary Poppins taught us. The Nanny Diaries has that, certainly. Just a bit more salt would have nicely balanced out this recipe, however. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
Scarlett Johansson‘s New Jersey-born heroine negotiating the perils of the urban jungle of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It tells the story of the emotional and often humorous journey of Annie Braddock (Johansson), a young woman fresh out of college and struggling to find her place in the world. Through a serendipitous meeting one afternoon, Annie fields an offer to become a live-in babysitter for a wealthy family. Equating nannying with “ducking out of life for a year,” Annie shruggingly accepts the position, only to be introduced into a surreal world of stressed-out extremes.Berman and Pulcini’s imaginative, flight-of-fancy touches are given nice visual showcase in a few bits, including a sequence of satirical museum dioramas that opens the movie and a recurrent leitmotif involving red umbrellas, the most obvious of a handful of allusions to Mary Poppins. But sentiment generally gets the better of shrewd satire here. And what the movie sorely lacks is much push-back or astute, in-the-moment analysis and frustrated reaction from Annie herself. We’re told (repeatedly, by Annie’s mother) how brilliant she is, but she’s also a bit rudderless. That’s legitimate, of course — youthful ambivalence is the new naïve stridency — but the movie confines Annie’s learned lessons largely to omniscient, after-the-fact narration, and this dents our identification with her. Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, Mary Poppins taught us. The Nanny Diaries has that, certainly. Just a bit more salt would have nicely balanced out this recipe, however. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.