In the 2002 best-seller “The Nanny Diaries,” the N.Y.U. graduates Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, who had spent some time taking care of children on the Upper East Side, pooled their anecdotes, merged into a single voice, and compiled a fiction about a young nanny’s suffering at the hands of a tyrannical Park Avenue couple. The book was both a cry of exasperation and an attack on the fatuity of wealth. Near the beginning, the heroine walks into a room and encounters what she calls “the full range of Upper East Side diversity—half the women are dressed in Chanel suits and Manolo Blahniks, half are in six-hundred-dollar barn jackets, looking as if they might be asked to pitch an Aquascutum tent at any moment.” This is clever, I suppose, yet the list of boutique products suggests that the heroine has pretty much the same values as the women she’s teasing, without having anything like their money. Parts of “The Nanny Diaries” read like a peculiarly self-pitying and envious piece of magazine journalism in which the upscale knowingness of the victim serves only to fuel her outrage over how badly she’s being treated. The book, more snark than satire, provides eager glimpses of emotional squalor and lousy parenting among the super-rich; it seems to be written for people who want to feel superior to the swells whose goods they in fact covet.
The talented writer-director team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (“American Splendor”), who did the movie adaptation, obviously realized that they had to change the disingenuous point of view. They have turned the nanny—or, as she’s called by her boss, “Nanny” (Scarlett Johansson)—into a New Jersey girl whose mother is a hardworking nurse. She is now a genuine outsider. And they’ve created a sprightly new voice for her. She studied anthropology in college, and she narrates a mock field report in which she examines, among other exotic creatures and tribes, a specimen known as Upper East Side Natives. We see these strange people at the Museum of Natural History, standing behind glass, in a diorama. Blond, stiff, and lean, they appear to be yearning for some ideal Nantucket of the mind. Propelled by such debonair flourishes, the movie takes off nicely. The enormous East Side apartment in which Nanny works has a slightly exaggerated gleam, as if the glass and porcelain had been created in a diamond mine. The adulterous dad, known only as Mr. X (Paul Giamatti), may be a caricature of boredom and moneyed contempt, but, as Mrs. X, Laura Linney finds something both scary and touching in the situation of a woman frightened of her own needy little boy and desperate to please her vile husband. We wait for some sort of commanding narrative to take hold.
Alas, none does. “The Nanny Diaries,” despite many bright moments and a superior level of craftsmanship, is now a flabby urban fairy tale. Nanny is treated like an indentured servant by Mrs. X, and when a handsome young man in the building—Harvard Hottie (Chris Evans), he’s called—advises her to quit her job, and she doesn’t, the movie’s senselessness becomes obvious. She tells Harvard Hottie that she has fallen in love with the family’s little boy, Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art), who needs her. But Nicholas Reese Art, a towhead with leather lungs and a face like a closed fist, is not a likable child—he has no personality at all—and Scarlett Johansson, trying to give the material a plausible emotional center, looks merely confused. At some level, Pulcini and Springer Berman must know that a white, college-educated nanny with many career opportunities is not a character who can legitimately generate much pathos, because suddenly, out of nowhere, they throw in a scene in which an African and two Latino nannies turn to the camera and complain (rightly) that they are trapped in their jobs. Nanny is trapped only by the falsity of the plot. The material has been turned into a trivially narcissistic product for teen-age girls who want to feel indignant about wrongs they are unlikely to suffer. Mrs. X, a kind of wicked stepmother, won’t let Nanny see her young man. But Harvard Hottie, a prince in a college workout shirt, outsmarts the boss. He pursues Nanny anyway and won’t take no for an answer.
At the bloody end of “3:10 to Yuma,” virtually all the surviving characters, not to mention a variety of strangers, get shot at point-blank range. It’s almost as if the stage were being cleared for some subsequent installment of what we’ve just been watching—the eternal conflict of good and evil in the Old West. There haven’t been many big-screen Westerns recently, but the form has lost none of its slightly absurd solemnity. It hasn’t lost its physical beauty, either, or its fervent seriousness about honor and courage. “3:10 to Yuma” is a remake of a 1957 Western directed by Delmer Daves, and this version—directed by James Mangold and written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, who amplified Elmore Leonard’s 1953 story and Halsted Welles’s script for the original—is faster, more cynical, and more brutal than the first. The setting is the Arizona territory after the Civil War, a wilderness with towns so ragged and insubstantial that they seem merely scratched onto the surface of the desert. Vengeful Apaches keep travellers awake at night, and Chinese coolies, working for the Southern Pacific Railroad, lay track across the mountains. Nothing resembling a social structure exists; individual character, for good or for ill, is all there is. In minor roles, the actors loom up at a saloon window or sit heavily on horseback, and each anonymous face, carved by terrible food, rotten liquor, and bad sex, makes an overwhelming impression of loneliness and discomfort. Peter Fonda, who is always described by publicists as an “icon,” shows up as a corrupt and violent bounty hunter—a thug with authority—and gives an amazingly fierce performance. In this movie, Fonda really is iconic. “3:10 to Yuma” may be familiar, but, at its best, it has a rapt quality, even an aura of wonder.