The Nanny Diaries is anything but interesting

Like the ridiculously successful The Devil Wears Prada, the chick flick The Nanny Diaries assumes, first, that you want to see how the upper sliver of society lives, and second, that you hunger to see its corrupt morals torn to shreds. What looks like explosive class hatred turns, inevitably, into a pathetic defense of bourgeois values. Big surprise, I know. But The Nanny Diaries is from the filmmakers of the craggy American Splendor; it stars Scarlett Johansson and Laura Linney. I had hoped for something interesting.

Johansson plays the luscious Annie Braddock, a recent college grad from New Jersey who’s trying to avoid landing a job in finance. She’d prefer to work as an anthropologist, and in a cutesy but harmless effect, the people she encounters on the streets of Manhattan are zapped into natural-history dioramas. One day, while walking in Central Park, she saves a little boy from imminent death and is rewarded with a job as a live-in nanny for a rich, heartless bitch named Mrs. X (Laura Linney).

Life in the X household is awful! The kid is the worst, Annie isn’t allowed to date the hot Harvard grad from upstairs, and her mounting lifestyle lust is making it difficult for her to relate to her token black best friend (Alicia Keys). Soon enough, however, Annie falls in love with the adorable kid and begins to sympathize with Mrs. X, who is being cuckqweaned (the antiquated female equivalent of being cuckolded—I’m trying to bring it back) at every turn. Complicated feelings ensue, but nothing, in the end, can erase the fact that the rich are criminally negligent, kids suffer under the care of temporary nannies, and if you don’t spend at least half the day coddling your child and teaching him French, you’re a bad mother.

THE NANNY DIARIES DIR. SHARI SPRINGER BERMAN AND ROBERT PULCINI | RATED PG-13 | AT SELECT THEATERS IN LA AND OC

Tags: diaries, nanny, rich people