Running time: 104 minutes
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti, Alicia Keys, Chris Evans
Rating 1 out of 10
Writer/director team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini scored a major success in 2003 with American Splendor, the inventive biopic of comic book writer Harvey Pekar which saw Paul Giamatti receive an Oscar nomination. Such is the vast gulf in quality between their first work and this latest effort that fans of the original will be left sorely disappointed. The Nanny Diaries is such a soporific, banal and cliched work that it really is hard to believe that it has come from the same team. Its attempts to pastiche the lives of the super wealthy on New York's Park Lane fall so wide of the mark that it makes Brian Di Palma's ill-fated and widely panned screen version of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities seem a lost treasure by comparison.
The (wholly unbelievable) plot sees Scarlett Johansson as a bright young college graduate who inexplicably gives up any chance of a successful career in order to look after the brattish 8-year-old child of banker Paul Giamatti and his uptight wife Laure Linney (painfully and rather predictably known only as Mr and Mrs X). Linney's character promises her new charge a life of luxury in return for some scant domestic help.
The reality is inevitably different: the child is spoilt and demanding, Linney is a bag of high class tension, and Giamatti's character is constantly off sealing deals or visiting his mistress. The only ray of light for the young nanny is her friendship with a college buddy (Alicia Keys) and a potential relationship with a showy but attractive upstairs neighbour (Chris Evans).
Based on a best-selling real-life memoir, this project may have looked good on the page, but the finished product is a cinematic mess. Performances and direction veer all over the place, and it's a chronic waste of quality acting talent.
Paul Hurley
