THE NANNY DIARIES and 3:10 TO YUMA

These two flicks are like genre films of the 1950s. THE NANNY DIARIES is like films they used to call “women’s movies” and 3:10 TO YUMA is actually a remake of a 1950s Western.

I went to see THE NANNY DIARIES, which I hadn’t read, because I love Scarlett Johansson. It had other terrific actors too, Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti.

But the direction—by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini—was too heavy-handed, so even though Linney was mostly terrific as usual, both she and Giamatti seemed like they were pushing at times (him in every scene he was in), what actors call “indicating” rather than just being.

Johansson was as adorable as always, comfortably allowing her natural sexual charisma to be clothed in regular-ness, as she often does in flicks. But her character too seemed unbelievable at times, especially for a “Jersey girl” (way too submissive to her boss etc.).

The only actor in the movie who seemed not to have been pushed too hard by the director was the little boy—Nicholas Reese Art. Whereas child actors often seem the only ones in movies to be directed with too heavy a hand, in THE NANNY DIARIES it was Art who was the heart of the movie, seemed the most genuine, and made it work as well as it did.

But it wasn’t just the direction that seemed heavy-handed. Like a lot of those old “women’s flicks,” the story was a little too pat too (the screen play is credited to the co-directors), villains villainy, innocents innocent, and what before the 1970s used to be called “a Hollywood ending”—meaning everything tired up in a neat little bow.

That didn’t stop my eyes from tearing up, I get tears watching commercials, and I laughed several times too. It wasn’t a “bad” movie, just not a great one.

3:10 TO YUMA, originally based on an early Elmore Leonard story, appealed to me more, maybe because it’s one of the genres that used to be seen as “men’s movies”—i.e. Westerns and war movies (which now fall under the broader category of “action” movies I guess).

It too had some Hollywood conventions, leftover from the Leonard story and the 1957 film made from it, but tried to pump them up with more contemporary blood and guts, literally, as well as more twists and complications in the plot and a heavier moral in a not quite so old-style Hollywood ending.

It also had some great actors, Russell Crowe for one, as great as always, and Peter Fonda as good as he’s ever been, in the role of a tough, mean, old codger. Christian Bale held his own with them, though he was slightly miscast, a little too heroic looking and behaving, even when the script called for something else.

Though the direction by James Mangold was pretty consistent (with a few missteps), again, the revelation of the movie was a “child actor.” This time a teenager—Logun Lerman—playing Bale’s character’s rebellious adolescent son, in a role that demanded a wide spectrum of emotion, which he managed impressively.

There also was Ben Foster in the kind of star-making role, as an unpredictably evil bad guy, that made Richatd Widmark’s career in KISS OF DEATH or James Woods pulled off in THE ONION FIELD.

But maybe in the end, the reason 3:10 TO YUMA got to me more than THE NANNY DIARIES is simply that I have had a teenage son and will have another in a few years, and I couldn’t help identifying with that father son relationship in ways that gave me a stake in the story’s outcome.

Unlike THE NANNY DIARIES, which telegraphed it’s direction and ending from the beginning, and seemed to portray all the grown “straight” males in it as either fulltime selfish assholes or absentees, with one exception—a “Harvard hottie.”

Not much to identify with there, like most men I know, I’m only a part-time selfish asshole—and I didn't go to Harvard.

So I say, if you’re interested, wait to see THE NANNY DIARIES on cable or DVD, but, 3:10 TO YUMA is worth seeing on the big screen.