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Show StatesmanSpectol Features Paee 28 Monday, Aug. 27, 2007 NANNY: Johnasson s character is wishy-washy [I continuedfrompage 3 major from a warm, uppermiddle-class family, Johansson's Annie/Nanny is a recent graduate who majored in business, minored in anthropology and is so thrown for a loop by life that she orders a burger at Bergdorfs. Her mother (Donna Murphy), a grim-faced nurse, raised her on her own and dreams of Annie transcending her background (her dad lives in a double-wide trailer!) by way of a job on Wall Street. Annie, naturally, dreams of becoming an anthropologist, a la Margaret Mead. This allows the filmmakers to catalog the various tribes of New York by placing them in individual dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. The diorama device is fitting, as we're given next to no glimpse into the inner life of Mrs. X — the trophy wife of a master of the universe whose fortress is forever being assailed catalog of injustices perpetrated on our heroine, instead of as frantic attempts to live up to a standard of perfection so exotic and perpetually out of reach as to be all but designed to drive people insane. Paul Giamatti sails through an easy stereotype as the cheating mergers-and-acquisitions mogul for whom a wife is a toy and a child is an asset, but other than lend the character an unexpected piggy coarseness, he doesn't do much with the part. More boring still is Nanny's love interest, the Harvard Hottie (Chris Evans), a blandly handsome stick figure who serves no purpose other than to give our heroine a shot at the life she's come to know and love-hate. And lest we think Nanny a hypocrite in the making, we're informed that H.H.'s life hasn't been quite as charmed as his address and educational background would suggest. Sure, he was raised by nannies, but by other, younger, aspiring trophy wives. Mrs. X is played by the fabulous Laura Linney, who, burnished to a high gloss, perfectly embodies the brittle, miserably lonely socialite whose days appear to be an uninterrupted orgy of "me-time." Here, however, Mrs. X has been stripped of the keening desperation that made her character so riveting in the book. Her demands are presented as little more than a BUY YOUR TEXTBOOKS AT THE BOOKSTORE AND master-slave dichotomy. Of course, it's a cardinal rule of the so-called chick-flick (the genre that hates itself) that the heroine's virtues and troubles revolve around nothing more than her underappreciated, inoffensive cuteness. The cliche of the hapless, humiliated young girl clumsily trying to navigate the world like a dizzy guppy in a tank full of barracudas has become so compulsory that the first we see of Annie, she's falling on the dais at graduation. Any inadvertent class issues raised during the course of her attempt to find herself, love and career satisfaction are dispatched by pitting the deserving poor(-ish) against the suspiciously moneyed. The actual poor, who at least merited some consideration in the novel, are reduced to background work here. it's because his mother died. (Otherwise, surely....) Stripped of her determination to do a good job, Johansson's character is wishy-washy and rudderless. No longer does she take it upon herself to keep hidden from Mrs. X a piece of stray lingerie that Mr. X's mistress has purposefully planted among the bedclothes. Instead she passively allows Mrs. X to find the garment in the laundry and insist that it must belong to her. What to make of changes such as this one, other than to assume that Hollywood squeamishness precludes our squeakyclean heroine from participating in a deception, or sympathizing with the devil? Morphing Nanny from a college student gaining valuable experience in her chosen field to an insecure, directionless post-grad comes off as the mother of all pulled punches. It was interesting to ponder the shock and awe of a well-adjusted member of the liberal meritocracy as she sank deeper into the maw of the insanely privileged classes. It's considerably less so to be presented with a classic But the idea that a relatively privileged college girl from a good home could be so casually enslaved by a plutocratic robber baroness? In America? Today? Can't touch that. AMACBOOKor PLAYSTATION3 AND OTHER GREAT PRIZES!!! For every $100 you spend on textbooks, enter to w M 'Contest nmsAug20-Sept 7. Limit 10 tickets per person per day. 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