Diary of a Nobody

Does anyone in America outside of Manhattan–and even inside Manhattan–care about the lives of aging WASP socialites who populate the grand old apartment buildings and townhouses along and between Park and Fifth Avenues? Once upon a time, the public lives of such people were chronicled in newspaper society pages and bold-face columns in Women’s Wear Daily, but those days and those columns are long gone.

It once mattered, in an indefinable way, who was on the host committee for this or that gala, but now such things matter only to those who aspire to them. The hoi polloi have moved on. Of far greater interest to everyone are the exhibitionistic children of privilege who straddle the increasingly narrow divide between High Society and Low Celebrity.

The problem for this remnant of the once-dominant WASP aristocracy is that it is notable solely for its wealth, and these days its wealth isn’t especially notable. Not when there are hedge-fund billionaires and venture capitalists running around whose Sun King standards for opulent living are deliciously chronicled in Robert Frank’s fine new book, Richistan. The chilly restraint of WASPdom, with its pursed lips and withering glances, is no match for the cheerful excesses of its successor culture.

And therein resides the reason that The Nanny Diaries, a new movie based on the 2002 bestseller, is proving to be such a dud at the box office. Like the book before it, the movie promises to expose the true nature of Upper East Side privilege, offering a staff’s-eye view of the grotesque misbehavior of the rich and powerful. But the book proved to be a bit of a scam. More than a million people bought it and read it to find out the secrets, and I suspect most of them were as disappointed as I was by its banal portrait of living large. The unhappily married couple at the center of The Nanny Diaries don’t seem anywhere near as rich as the parents who buy their repulsive teenage daughters $300,000 parties on MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, and they don’t seem to have or wield power–socially, financially, or personally.

What’s more, the up-close-and-personal portraits of these people are so riven with cliché that they have appeared in dozens, if not hundreds, of books before The Nanny Diaries. Solipsistic Upper East Side mother? Check. Boorish and uninvolved Upper East Side father? Check. I remember first reading about all this when I was eight years old in Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), which is a novel for children.

What was new in The Nanny Diaries was the outraged portrait of the nanny’s mistreatment by her horrible employers. Our heroine is a recent college graduate of relatively modest means who finds herself spending a summer working as the nanny of a five-year-old boy. His mother is a self-involved harridan and his mostly absent father is a monstrous boor. Our nanny heroine is horribly mistreated, but can’t quit because she cares about the little boy too much. The matriarch doesn’t allow the nanny a single night off and forces her to perform all sorts of menial domestic chores having nothing to do with the care and nurturing of the family’s neglected child.

The only frisson provided by The Nanny Diaries is a masochistic one: The poor girl is working for abusive monsters, and she only sticks around because the emotionally abused little boy needs her. That’s pretty small beer, and I imagine that the book’s readers have little interest in revisiting this world at the local multiplex. If ever a movie premiered with negative word of mouth based on its source material, The Nanny Diaries was the one.

And that’s too bad, because there’s a lot of good stuff in this movie. It was written and directed by a married couple named Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. They spent years making documentaries before they broke out in 2003 with American Splendor, in which they invented an entirely new approach to telling a real person’s story in a fictional film and came away with the best American movie of the year.

Like American Splendor, The Nanny Diaries is told in an unconventional way, and that’s the best thing about it. The directors decided to imbue the heroine, Annie (Scarlett Johansson), with an interest in anthropology, and have her open and close the movie as though she were Margaret Mead delivering a lecture on the Samoans–complete with full-size dioramas based on the famous ones at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Another inspired conceit is the Parents Society, a club where bitter, Botoxed matrons spend lots of time attending lectures on how to be good mommies–which means they spend even less time around their children.

I think Springer and Pulcini originally planned to structure the entire movie as an anthropology lecture punctuated and highlighted by repeated visits to the Parents Society. If they had done so, The Nanny Diaries would have been as offbeat and strange as American Splendor and maybe nearly as good. Instead, they chose (or were compelled) to downplay their original ideas in favor of a more conventional narrative, and the conventional narrative is just a glossy soap opera about a bad marriage, a mean boss, a neglected child, and a naive young thing caught in the middle.

There’s some good soap opera here, notably a haunting performance by Laura Linney as the unpleasant mother and a chillingly feral turn by Paul Giamatti (the peerless star of American Splendor) as the awful father.

But there’s also very, very bad soap opera–as represented by Annie the Nanny’s tedious relationships with her mother, her best friend, and a nice rich boyfriend who was once a poor little rich kid like her charge. This is all made worse because of a really terrible lead performance by the talentless starlet Scarlett Johansson. Why anybody in Hollywood willingly chooses to employ this person is beyond me. (Woody Allen does, of course, but that’s because she’s 22 and chesty and he’s 71 and repellent.)

The Nanny Diaries is a mess, but it’s a very interesting mess, which is more than you can say for most Hollywood fare. But just as the WASP ascendancy had its moment, now past, so, too, did The Nanny Diaries. And its moment was five years ago, in print.

John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.