Satire should be knife-sharp and whip-smart, and The Nanny Diaries never is. Johansson plays Annie Braddock, a middle-class Jersey girl just graduated from college without a clue as to who she is, or what she wants. After a Wall Street job interview gone awry, Annie has a putatively comic Central Park encounter with a kid named Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art) and the kid's out-of-sorts mom, Mrs. X (Laura Linney). Mrs. X is flummoxed because she's just lost her nanny, and has no idea what to do with the towheaded whippersnapper who sprang from her womb.
Thus, Annie - conversant in English, with a college degree - stumbles into a new career, hotly sought after by a swarm of wealthy Upper East Side women. Mrs. X wins out, and so begin Annie's adventures in wonderland: tending to an overbooked but underloved boy while his mother flits from charity function to Chanel fitting, and his father - Mr. X (an awkward, miscast Paul Giamatti) - fondles his coworker and takes lengthy business trips out of town.
Johansson, displaying flustered mannerisms that smack of one too many Woody Allen projects, goes about all this like the hopeful protagonist of a sitcom pilot. That is, attractive, amorphous, bland. Too embarrassed to tell her mother (Donna Murphy) what she's doing for a living, Annie confides only to her best friend, Lynette (Alicia Keys), and Lynette's gay roomie (Nathan Corddry). And then there's the so-called Harvard Hottie (Chris Evans), a preppy neighbor in the X's apartment building and an eager suitor - if only Annie would take him up on his offer of a drink.
