We'd like this off our resumes, please
The setting is Manhattan's Upper East Side. A fresh college graduate, eager to put some sort of imprint upon the world but clueless about how to properly do so, takes a job – so easily gotten! -- as a nanny. If she squints really hard, this young woman can see the position being sorta-kinda related to anthropology, the field she eventually wants to enter. She's thrilled. Until she finds out that the exhausting, humiliating, and often just plain impossible mother-child-nanny power struggle she's now engaged in is its own circle of hell.
If The Nanny Diaries sounds familiar, it's because you've seen it before – only it was called The Devil Wears Prada, with a fabulous spring collection standing in for the baby that a slave-driving bitch casually bears, then orders an exasperated lackey to kill herself trying to care for it. Oh: And it was also a book, a novelized bit of composite nonfiction by former New York nannies Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. But this is Hollywood, and the book was predominantly dark and biting. So readers should prepare themselves to see the more precious, message-touting, "In a world..." version of Annie's story on the big screen. (Yes, Annie's: The character is also no longer "Nan.")
The shift in tone is surprising only when you consider the film's writers-directors, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. The pair may have 2003's witty, meta Harvey Pekar biopic American Splendor on their resumes, but their offbeat sensibility isn't much in evidence here. The movie is framed as an anthropological study – which would have been more interesting if Mean Girls hadn't taken a similar approach three years ago – of "resourceful" UES mothers who manage to juggle days full of pursuits such as shopping, pampering, and puking. And, of course, monitoring not their children, but their nannies: When Annie (a dowdied Scarlett Johansson) runs into her tiny future liege, Grayer (Nicholas Art), and his mother, Mrs. X (Laura Linney), in a park, the mother and son are together only because Mrs. X had just fired Grayer's latest nanny. Annie wasn't looking to become a sitter – she'd majored in business -- but she'd just blown a big corporate interview, and when Mrs. X mishears her name as her occupation, she begs Annie to work for her. Grayer seems sweet, and Annie needs a job, so she agrees.
Bergman and Pulcini at the very least still rather entertainingly eviscerate the book's main target, well-off women who are mothers in name only. The gorgeously coiffed and wardrobed Linney easily pulls off the icy, deplorable caricature that comprises the bulk of Mrs. X (the authors kept most of the characters anonymous, including Nan/Annie's love interest, "Harvard Hottie"). The woman mistreats her employees while pretending to live for haute couture, bullshit benefits, and general one-upmanship; really, though, she does care that her husband (Paul Giamatti, using his schlubbiness to dirtbag effect) is cheating on her and spends even less time with their bratty son than she does, and Linney is careful to let cracks of this show as well.
But even though the end of the story was changed to emphasize this damnation of absentee parenting, the alteration is really all about making the heroine look good. Annie and her adventures in babysitting are no longer part of a satire, but a feel-good fable about growing up: Annie lies to her working-class mother, whom at one point randomly insists that "no man is going to squash your dream!", about taking the lowly job and struggles with "which kind of New Yorker" she is destined to become. The angle would be more palatable if it weren't mired in sitcom humor (how else to meet the man of your dreams but locked out in a hallway with your pants down?) and treacle ("I wuv you!"). Worse, Johansson just isn't all that likable in such a comic-everywoman role, appearing stiff as she tries to flail and sputter like a more normal 22-year-olds instead of the preternaturally self-possessed one that the actress actually seems to be. One could imagine Anne Hathaway getting it right, but apparently she was busy.
Whatever you say, Mom. Party!
Human beings in general are under the microscope in The Invasion, the fourth film adaptation of Jack Finney's novel, Body Snatchers. Why make a version in 2007 after it's already been done in 1956, 1978, and 1993? Iraq, of course. And Darfur. And even Hurricane Katrina. This generation's Invasion, penned by first-timers Dave Kaiganich and directed by German-born Oliver Hirschbiegel (with some help, reportedly, from The Matrix's Andy and Larry Wachowski), doesn't just hint at the allegory inherent in its story about an alien life form steathily taking over the human race, creating a world without emotion in the process. On one side, there are the converted, who naturally want to convert. On the other are the paranoid, friends and family to the outsiders who, though they can't quite put a finger on how, are pretty sure that Uncle Joe and little Jimmy just ain't right.
In 1956, Communism was the thing to be feared, yet the makers of the first film only briefly mention "what's going on in the world" to prompt viewers who wanted more than a mystery to read between the pods. Here, you *will* get the message. Current news constantly pours out of televisions, radios, newspapers, and, in case you can't read headlines, characters' mouths. The idea: Would we be better off as a society of robots, living without war and crime because we no longer feel? The answer is an altogether too positive one, at least for an otherwise dark and satisfying thriller.
Nicole Kidman stars as Carol Bennell, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist who hears the infamous "My [blank] is no longer my [blank]" line from one of her patients (Veronica Cartwright, who co-starred in the 1978 movie and gives a terrific monologue here). Immediately, Carol begins noticing oddities, too – a kid who gets attacked by a dog yet isn't frightened, the people spread out neatly at a bus stop, the sudden appearance of her ex-husband, who now insists on spending time with their son, Oliver (Jackson Bond). Even though she spends her days personally quelling her clients with drugs – here's another message for you -- she's not so hot on the idea of it occurring outside of her control. With the help of her boyfriend, Ben (Daniel Craig), Carol gets a sample of some goo she found analyzed and discovered that it's a gene-mutating life form that alters its hosts when they sleep. By this time, Washington is full of replicants – well, more than usual.
Despite its political overobviousness, The Invasion is a taut adaptation of Finney's well-worn story. The explanation of where the body snatchers (though the term isn't used) came from and why they're a danger is more comprehensible, both in actual explanation and in feeling. These zombies aren't vacant but have menace in their eyes, and are second-Dawn of the Dead-quick to gather and zone in on creatures that aren't one of them. Whereas previous fighters against the invasion seemed to be merely living among the sleep-deprived, Carol and her small group seem in constant, claustrophobic danger of vultures out for their lives. The fear is still largely psychological, with a layer of tension added when Carol is separated from her son. But there's also an injection of action, albeit nowhere near the overload you might expect from a modern-day, Wachowski-enhanced blockbuster. (Their touch is subtle but recognizable, particularly during a darkly lit and balletically blocked car chase.) The fun ends, though, with a narrative twist that's blown up into, essentially, a giant cop-out that's completely out of character with previous versions. In the end, The Invasion is the opposite of what it should be: all emotion and no guts.