Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson) and I are simpatico. We represent Jersey, loathe the Upper East Side, use “the umbrella building” in Tribeca as a route marker, and have a thing for Chris Evans. Difference is that Annie lives in a PG-13 world, and in The Nanny Diaries, she refers to Evans’s character as Harvard Hottie, which isn’t funny if you’ve spent the last four years calling him My Future Husband. After literally falling into a nanny position, 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. Everyone gets a cute nickname, a means for this amateur anthropologist to protect the innocent and maintain some semblance of objectivity while advancing tired stereotypes of what it’s like to be made in Manhattan. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Reductive correlates this luxe sphere to a desiccated museum tableau, but at least Annie considers the lifestyle of her employers, Mr. and Mrs. X (Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney), with an interesting mixture of jealousy and revulsion, and her sweeping generalities about everyone who comes from privilege are gently rebuked by Harvard Hottie over a slice of pizza. What a guy, but what a pity that Lady and the Tramp had infinitely more chemistry.
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