The Nanny Diaries.

"The Nanny Diaries, based on Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's best-selling novel (a roman à clef), is a grim slog," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Most American movies downplay issues of class and privilege; this one creates museum tableaux to illustrate them. But what follows is nothing but stereotypes - and an argument for why anthropology should inform drama rather than shape it. Your first look at a character tells you everything you need to know. As you watch the nannies mistreated and the children left to cry themselves to sleep, the only surprise is that there are no surprises. It's zombie-land."

Also: Bilge Ebiri's "guide to how accurately (or implausibly) other films have tackled New York worlds."

Updated through 8/27.

The movie actually improves on the book "in several key respects," argues Scott Foundas in the Voice. "Chiefly, it makes Nanny into a more appealing figure (and not just because she's played by Scarlett Johansson)... [Shari Springer] Berman and [Robert] Pulcini, former documentarians who segued to features with the beautifully rendered American Splendor, can spin only so much cinematic silk from literary leather."

Earlier: Melena Ryzik's interview with Berman and Pulcini for the New York Times.

Updates, 8/22: "Shifting between broad farce and tender romance, the comedy throws off some droll barbs on the emotional poverty of Manhattan's rich, but delivers few genuine laughs," writes David D'Arcy for Screen Daily. "[S]entiment disappointingly eclipses satire, and the movie's promising edge surrenders to a happy ending as a nanny saves the world, one over-privileged family at a time."

"Annie is introduced to a New York City environ whose rituals she pours over with the awe of someone who's never ventured above Union Square or never seen a Woody Allen movie in her entire life," notes Ed Gonzalez in his two-out-of-four star review for Slant.

Alonso Duralde, writing for MSNBC, American Splendor is "one of the best movies made in this country in the last five years. And while Nanny Diaries doesn't represent a horrible sophomore slump, it's certainly a letdown by comparison.... Here's hoping that the very talented Springer and Pulcini get a crack at a script that's worthy of their talents for their third time at bat."

Updates, 8/23: In the New York Press, Armond White argues that the film "restore[s] Johansson's humanity" and "breaks movie culture's unspoken taboo against class consciousness."

Reviewing the movie for Time, Richard Schickel finds it "much better than a slick adaptation of a best-selling novel has any right to be."

Ryan Stewart interviews Berman and Pulcini for Cinematical.

"[M]iddle-class strife is contrasted with Park Avenue snobbery, but a complacent tone homogenizes both realms," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "A blatantly parodic moment finds Mr X's mother on the beach reading the Diaries novel, practically suggesting that the filmmakers, devoid of new ideas, are desperately trying to tap a well that was dry in the first place."

"It should have been a snappy, catty diversion on the order of The Devil Wears Prada," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Yet watching the movie is a nonexperience - like the Upper East Side apartment where most of the action takes place, it's lavishly appointed but joyless."

Updates, 8/24: It's a "plodding and generic adaptation, which by rights should have been pure, eat-the-rich summer fun," writes Carina Chocano, notes a few changes the story's undergone on its way to the screen in the Los Angeles Times. "Morphing Nanny from a college student gaining valuable experience in her chosen field to an insecure, directionless post-grad comes off as the mother of all pulled punches. It was interesting to ponder the shock and awe of a well-adjusted member of the liberal meritocracy as she sank deeper into the maw of the insanely privileged classes. It's considerably less so to be presented with a classic master-slave dichotomy."

"As this exposé of the rich and miserable on the Upper East Side wobbles along uncertainly, it rests on the tense, squared shoulders of Laura Linney," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Ms Linney defies a screenplay that paints her character, Mrs X, a Park Avenue socialite, as a monstrous control freak. She is a smart, flexible actress who invests her role, a composite of former employers of the novel's authors, with enough humanity to arouse some pity."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek finds Nanny "more enjoyable than slick, aggressively hyped duds like The Devil Wears Prada. It may be polished, but unlike that picture, it doesn't feel canned."

Update, 8/25: Sandy Cohen talks with Johansson and notes that she isn't the only indie actress who occasionally breaks out in song.

Update, 8/27: "We wait for some sort of commanding narrative to take hold," sighs David Denby in the New Yorker. "Alas, none does."

Posted by dwhudson at August 21, 2007 1:32 PM