Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney, Nicholas Art, Chris Evans
Directors: Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
Category: I
More than an hour into The Nanny Diaries, the film's main character, lost-in-Manhattan New Jersey girl Annie (Scarlett Johansson, right), sits in Central Park and muses, in a Woody Allen-esque monologue, about her predicament. Having fluffed a job interview at an investment bank, she has taken a job as a child-carer for a wealthy New York family.
Annie fancies herself as a bit of an anthropologist, and she's concerned about 'going native'. She frets that instead of merely observing the seemingly alien antics of the city's high-society figures, she is fast becoming absorbed into their world, unable to cast a critical eye on her subjects' peculiar rituals as she becomes emotionally attached to them. The only way out, Annie thinks, is to cut the links and leave.
Of course, she fails - and her failure mirrors that of The Nanny Diaries. Instead of sticking to its brief - to satirise the quirks and excesses of the Big Apple's moneyed elite, as does the novel on which it is based - the film veers into feel-good territory. Instead of offering a forensic study of the city's power-brokers and their socialite spouses, filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini retreat into telling a conventional story, conventionally, with a degree of sympathy for their subjects that undermines the attempt to lampoon them.