3 posts tagged “laura linney”
Overheard on our way out of The Savages:
"I was hoping it was going to be a little more uplifting."
Ugh.
The Savages is not particularly "uplifting", what with being a movie about the universal discomfort that arises from watching our parents die and all. It's not very funny, it's not an adorable romp, and it's not delightfully quirky. But it's got Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman in it, and if that does nothing for you then you might be in the wrong place.
And look at this goddamn poster by Chris Ware. I hate to surrender so willfully to a peace of marketing, but this is gorgeous.
Gypsy: New York is the center of everything!
Mama Rose: New York is the center of New York!
The Nanny Diaries is not for me, and though it tried to fool me with the presence of Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney, and Paul Giamatti, it was never going to be.
Johansson is Annie Braddock, an intolerably passive college graduate who eschews starting her life "properly" in favor of a menial nanny job for the "X" family of the Upper East Side. Annie thinks it will be a lark, but the monstrous Mrs. X (Linney), neglectful of her son and cartoonishly self-absorbed, ensures that she'll have to earn her keep. Against her better judgment, Annie becomes fairly attached to Grayer, her ward, and then finds herself knee-deep in Mrs. X's problems with Mr. X (Paul Giamatti) and unable to extricate herself because of a promise to Grayer. And if that weren't enough, she's forbidden by Mrs. X to pursue a romance with the implausibly perfect "Harvard Hottie" (yes... that's the cringe-worthy name he's given in the voice over), played amicably by Chris Evans of the Fantastic Four movies.
Laura Linney is great, though if you've seen You Can Count On Me, The Squid And The Whale, or The Truman Show, you know that she can do characters of much colder depth in her sleep. The most interesting performance here is Paul Giamatti, who is fucking terrifying as the glassy-eyed and emotionally vacant Mr. X. I don't know if he was going for "serial killer", but if he was... mission accomplished.
As satire, it's far too chuffed with its own access to the Manhattan's Upper East Side to be effective. "Look, they have tofu cutlets in the fridge! Can you believe how they go to parenting seminars instead of actually parenting?! And isn't it clever how we're framing all of this as if it's an anthropological paper? Because New York is like an adorable jungle, but without all the mosquitoes and brown people!" I get it.
I have an irrational hatred for things like Sex & The City that treat New York as a kind of Narnia for affluent white people, and The Nanny Diaries is firmly in that mold. In a maudlin subplot involving Annie's put-upon New Jersey mother, we are given plenty of lip service about Annie's own working class roots, but her ambition at the end of the film as in the beginning is to leave New Jersey behind and live in Manhattan, where anything can happen! Sure, it's poking fun at the selfish wealth of New York's elite, but it's also buying into every cliché that New York irrationally perpetuates about itself. The Upper East Side is all demonic rich people! Everything below 14th Street is funky and authentic! Central Park is a dewy meadow rife with snow cone salesmen! Oh God, why won't you shut up?
The film is also constantly reminding the viewer that this job is beneath Annie's station in life, which is to be young, white, and beautiful in New York. No, a nanny gig is only a long term option if you are foreign and poor, a stance confirmed by the ending (spoiler alert, I suppose) in which Annie leaves her fellow nannies behind in the trenches to attend graduate school. They make a point of saying that she's doing it with the help of scholarships, as if all of those other nannies could also leave their jobs behind if only they had Annie's plucky ambition.
What about those women who weren't just slumming for a summer? The film features these working class nanny characters, as if it's to be commended for acknowledging that most people in this job do not look like Scarlett Johansson. But all it does is bring the breezy non-problems of our heroine into sharper focus, and it gives the whole affair the feeling of, well, "crappy puff piece".
Breach is a foregone conclusion of a movie, eschewing narrative suspense in favor of the momentary disorientation and secondary panic that comes with our proxy's submersion in deceit. There is little question as to how the story will end (not only is it based on a true story, but the film begins with John Ashcroft's press conference on the matter), but even so there are moments of true tension that come about mostly from Chris Cooper's really insane performance. Robert Hanssen, played by Cooper, is a senior FBI agent suspected of, as it turns out, selling secrets to the Russians and all of that.
As working with Hanssen is painted as a never ending back and forth, a perpetually awkward game of balance and poise, so the film never quite finds the confident footing that might have saved it. Ryan Phillipe is Eric O'Neill, the up and coming potential agent who is assigned to spy on the master spy by serving him as an assistant. Phillipe, who I usually like, is kind of vapid here, and is given to a lot of unnecessary brow furrowing and scenery chewing that played well when DiCaprio and Whalberg went back and forth in those hilarious and violent Departed exchanges, but seems out of place in what should be, above all, a procedural film. There's more All The President's Men here than Bourne Identity, or at least there is when the film is cooking.
And let me tell you, no one makes procedure sexier than Laura Linney does.
There's also a really problematic scene between O'Neill and his father that is not only confusing, but ultimately superfluous. Bruce Davison, wasted again!
There was a really great interview with the real O'Neill (The Real O'Neill, a lost Raymond Chandler story?) on Fresh Air a few weeks ago. He described Hanssen's odd, psychosexual methods for gaining and maintaining control of his interactions, from a Catherine Zeta-Jones fixation to a predilection for "close talking". More than anything else, though, Hanssen seems to exert control through his faith, and it's that off-putting religious psychosis that Cooper plays with and, I think, has a lot of fun with.
What the film doesn't address, and it seems like a bit of a gaping hole, is that the Cold War is over, and yet there is still all this business with Russian spies and what have you. Aren't we friendly with Russia? I know that that's incredibly naive, and yet it still kind of hangs out there like a booger, at least for me. But the film isn't really concerned with what Hanssen gave up to the Russians (they make sure we know that some people got executed, so we know he's bad), but more with the interplay between he and O'Neill, which is the heart and strength of a pretty entertaining film.
Watch it with:
Swimming With Sharks (George Huang, 1994), and try to decide to whom you'd rather be an assistant, Robert Hanssen or Buddy Ackerman.
