Krissys Books: Movie Night: The Nanny Diaries

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Movie Night: The Nanny Diaries

Review:

A college graduate goes to work as a nanny for a rich New York family. Ensconced in their home, she has to juggle their dysfunction, a new romance, and the spoiled brat in her charge.

The Nanny Diaries is a prime example of what happens when writers allow the movie industry creative rights to a film based on their book. The movie industry writes a completely different story loosely based on what the book is about then they change the story to suit their needs. What is sad about that is that the original author already had laid out the perfect formula for a movie if they had stuck with it.

Unfortunately the movie developers changed the story, they cut up the scenes, and the characters fall flat.

The movie has no real glue to create any emotional depth they try to establish and its not worth investing in because the movie speeds on to the next scene before they've really done anything for the previous one.

The parental neglect is glanced over, Nanny's previous experience is removed along with her personal sacrifice, you miss out on scenes that are fundamental to establish the bond between Nanny and Grayer and their journey together, extra characters are Hollow and literally carry no heart and no purpose in the film.

If they had extended the length of the movie and put in those scenes they left out of the movie that were in the book that made the book so much better I think it would have been great. Sadly they didn't.

The only scene I did like in the movie was the Nanny Cam scene where you get a reaction from Mrs X.

The additional predictable ending however I did not care for but I understand that to appeal to the non readers they needed to create something to give Mrs X last minute appeal.

I couldn't decide to rate this movie a two or three star rating so I went with three because while I didn't particularly care for the movie and really enjoyed the book a whole lot more, I did like Johansson's acting because you could tell did what she could with what she had to work with which wasn't much.