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The Nanny Diaries Reviews

[edit] The Mahalo Top 7

- "And in the end The Nanny Diaries is an entertaining study of how class warfare — honest working girl vs. the arrivistes — works out in a society that likes to pretend that such warfare is a thing of the past. It isn't, of course, and the movie is tender enough, tough enough and wise enough finally to broker a satisfying truce between the combatants."

- "Profundity, then, is not the movie's strong suit. But for all its pop-song philosophizing, this adaptation of the novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus is still a late-summer delight, a sleek, handsomely made bauble buoyed by a cast much stronger than the flimsy material deserves."

- "Without her presence as a snooty Upper East Side mother in The Nanny Diaries—a crisp, though conventional, adaptation of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus' popular novel—the film might have been little more than a collection of broad comic stereotypes and family-values sentiment. But with her, the film receives some badly needed dimension to its thin satire, not to mention the lion's share of the laughs."

- "Comparing The Nanny Diaries to The Devil Wears Prada is inviting. Both movies attempt to rethink their meager chick-lit sources. But The Devil Wears Prada used Hollywood glamour to make smart points about working women and their choices. The Nanny Diaries has its heroine floating over Manhattan like Mary Poppins (the red umbrella has been plucked off the Travelers Insurance building). None of the characters in "Prada" were fish in a barrel. You could make sushi with the women in The Nanny Diaries, though. The movie's banal fantasies badly chafe any anthropological consideration of what a girl should do with her career. This isn't life. It's Lifetime.

- "The most disappointing aspect about The Nanny Diaries, however, is that it was written and directed by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini as the follow-up to their wonderful 2003 debut American Splendor, a film as brave, quirky, funny, wonderfully acted and resoundingly human as you could possibly want. Those qualities, among others, are not to be found anywhere here–outside of some amusing visual touches in the early going (such as a series of museum dioramas offering anthropological views of contemporary New Yorkers), this is filmmaking as bland and flavorless as it gets. "

- "There's nothing to criticize in this performance, but there's nothing to get excited about, either. It's solid though uninspired work."

- "Despite some clever early fantasy scenes, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's adaptation of best seller The Nanny Diaries won't make Bridget Jones give up her writing."

- "Somehow the movie doesn't send you out on the high you expect...You want to see Armageddon visited upon the transgressor. That's the transaction that must close the film. But the film doesn't quite deliver...It ends not with a bang but with a mutter."

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