Film

Think back to The Devil Wears Prada: A nice young woman takes a thankless job working for a spoiled power-mad bitch, learns to do the job well, but ultimately turns her back on that self-absorbed subculture to pursue a hipper life, complete with hunky boyfriend. Shift the context from fashion magazines to the households of New York City’s upper crust, add some cutesy, belabored use of anthropological terminology to describe the goings-on, and you’ve got The Nanny Diaries. Like the book on which it’s based, this oddly flat comedy is so gleeful in its attacks on the rich that you almost side with the wealthy jerks out of a sense of fair play.

Recent college grad Annie (Johansson, who shows by comparison how good Anne Hathaway was in Devil) is torn between the corporate track and anthropology. Stalling for time, she takes a job with the X family (the anonymity is another annoying affectation taken from the book) as a nanny for their sweet but spoiled son, Grayer (Art). The gig turns out to be a study in humiliation and absurdly bad parenting ideas. Notes from the haughty, pampered Mrs. X (Linney) are addressed to “Nanny” and give instructions like, “MOMA is an appropriate outing, the park is not.”

In cloyingly self-satisfied voiceover, Annie chronicles what crappy parents the Xes are. There are some laughs here, and Linney does her damnedest to match Meryl Streep’s movie-stealing stunt in Devil, but that’s a game she can’t win with this material. When the stakes are shifted from next season’s hot purse to the raising of children, the whole story seems less funny and more tragic.