In "The Nanny Diaries," the sublime Linney takes the most reprehensible of icons, the snooty, privileged, controlling Upper East Side rhymes-with-rich, and delivers a masterpiece of Cruella De Vil-level toxin as the Park Avenue hostess with the leastest, Mrs. X. She becomes the woman you love to hate. But -- this is the greatness of Linney -- she also gives you a glimpse of the forces that crushed her into such monstrous certitude. It's funny, it's sad, it's real.
Too bad, alas, the rest of the movie isn't. The unsinkable Linney -- and this has happened too much to her -- is once again the best thing in the movie and manages to keep it afloat. Too bad she didn't sail on the Titanic that fateful April evening. Derived from a best-selling novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, it tells a fish-out-of-water story in which its heroine, Annie Braddock, a bright New Jersey college grad (Scarlett Johansson, possibly out of her depth), stumbles into a job as a nanny for the rich socialite's son. No surprise, she finds the work demeaning, degrading, endless, annoying and crushing, and feels herself especially crushed by the iron whimsy of Mrs. X, even as she develops a countervailing powerful affection for her young charge, Grayer......
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