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From SeeingBlack.com Movies/TV
Right off the back, I can tell all you Alicia Keys fans that if you have any notion about seeing this film in order to see Keys, you might be disappointed. As a friend named Lynette to the aforementioned nanny (Johannsen), Keys plays just a bit part but plays her bit part in an engaging, photogenic manner. With her café au lait glow, she is the most colorful piece of window dressing in a narrative where most of the people are very pale, very WASPy and very Upper East Side. The story is about what happens when Annie, a recent college graduate in anthropology, takes a job as a nanny to instead of one in high finance as her hard-working mother from New Jersey expects. Intending to be part-employee and part voyeur, she intends to keep a diary about her life with a super-rich couple we know only by the letter X—(no relation to Malcolm)—who live in a swanky Fifth Avenue building and have such de-natured, stilted lives that they have virtually no time for their young son, Grayer, who understandably has developed closer relationships with his caretakers than with his parents. While we “hear” snippets of Annie’s diary entries, we learn most about the X family through watching the narrative unfold. So even though the diary is the hook here, the movie—until the end at least—seems to be less about her observations than about her brutal interactions with the family. It seems more about the nonstop abuse and torture Annie is willing to endure in order to observe her subjects, more about her own consideration of what it means to be a human being and her growing connection to Grayer Perhaps the juxtaposition of Annie, daughter of nurse, to the privileged X family doesn’t strike me as especially marked because, in my eyes, they are all White and privileged in this society. Annie may be a nanny but she is a White, American-born nanny, very different from the immigrants from the Caribbean, Ireland, India and Eastern Europe who she bumps into on her investigation. She jokes that a rich, handsome man she meets is “slumming” by talking to her but she herself is also slumming in a job well beneath her educational level. And, of course, with her movie star good looks, she also has the advantage of being an attractive White woman, able to “marry up” out of her humble roots as fast as she can say “engagement ring.” The most striking, if you want to call it that, contrast for me is the fact that this subtle, unstated but very real social mobility does not exist for Lynette, who seems to be very clear with that and fine with that. Maybe there are some important lessons here about how the poor have much to teach the rich about humanity but this is a time-worn lesson that is not at the top of my list these days. I’d rather spend my worry and energy on people with real problems not of their own making. This review also appeared on www.BET.com. Please support us by ordering Esther Iverem's We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, April 2007)at Amazon.com or at your favorite bookstore. Thanks! © Copyright by SeeingBlack.com |
