Did you like The Devil Wears Prada? Well if you did, then you should absolutely adore The Nanny Diaries right? Maybe not so much because it is so obvious from the first reel that the success of Prada was foremost on the minds of the people behind Diaries. Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t find the right equation of bitter versus funny and that’s a difficult equation to balance at even the best of times.



Not helping matters is that fact that everyone in the film is referenced by one kind of amusing alias, descriptive or otherwise, even the film’s narrator and heroine Annie (Scarlett Johansson). Annie’s just graduated college without a clue as to what’s next and she stumbles into a nanny gig for the even more clueless Mrs X (Laura Linney). The X’s are a typical Upper East Side Manhattan couple were Dad works too much and Mom plays too much while pretending that she has a hard-knock life as she ignores her son, Grayer (Nicholas Art).



Part of the problem is that these kind of Mo Money, No Problem socialites are too easy a target to get any real kind of laugh traction off of. Linney is shrill and uninspired as the so-named Mrs. X, I realize that the point of referring to her as such is to protect the innocent, but it’s meant to be the bland name for a blander character. If you want to see a real evil socialite, then stick with Streep in Prada, or Lindsay Lohan on a coke fuelled joy ride.



As for Johansson, she’s not really given the answer to that question of acting questions: what’s my motivation? Seriously, you could understand in Prada that Anne Hathaway’s Andy was taking crap from Streep’s Miranda because she knew it’d help her career in the long run. What’s Annie’s excuse? She doesn’t want to tell her Mom that she doesn’t want to be a Wall Street broker. That’s like a Saved By the Bell plot, straight out of the Zack Morris playbook.



The funny part is I like Annie’s mom played by Donna Murphy, I wish there was more stuff with her and I wish that she wasn’t played quite so obliviously. I also wish that there had been more stuff about young Grayer (or Grover as he’s nicknamed by Annie) and how all the nanny shifting and parental neglect has an affect on the boy. But no, we get Annie’s can she or can’t she relationship with the “Harvard Hottie” (Chris Evans) and how he’s the one guy in all of the Upper East Side that isn’t blinded by the bling.



It’s hard to believe that this is from the same filmmaking team that brought us American Splendor except for the fact that Paul Giamatti was easily obtainable for the thankless role of Mr. X. This thing is about five years out of date, a pure post 90s artefact that feels really out of touch and more than that, like it’s been done already only better. Frankly, I was bored most of the time and I never felt there was an adequate dramatic resolution between Annie and Mrs. X, unless you count yelling at the nanny cam satisfactory.