Uptown Girls (Special Edition) (2003)

Molly becomes a nanny to precocious Ray Schleine (Dakota Fanning), an "eight-year-old going on forty." Emotionally distant from her fast-paced A&R executive mother, Roma (Heather Locklear), Ray has grown up with a revolving door of nannies and too little stability. Molly and Ray both feel painfully alone in the world, but as they try to make their new arrangement work, each discovers in the other a true friend.
 
"Add marvelously imaginative directing--finally Yakin fulfills the promise he showed in Fresh almost a decade ago--and you have a colorful, creative, deliciously frolicsome romp."  David Sterrit, Christian Science Monitor
 


Editor's Note

Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning star in this charming romp about a young woman and a young girl who are thrust together against the odds but ultimately teach each other something about life and love. Murphy is Molly Gunn, a rock and roll princess whose father was a famous music legend. She lives wildly off her inheritance--until the man in charge of her money takes off with it. With bankruptcy staring her in the face, she is forced to do something she never dreamed of--get a job. So she becomes a nanny--for precocious Ray Schleine (Fanning), an eight-year-old who acts more mature than she does but doesn't have much fun in life.

Boaz Yakin's comedy is filmed throughout New York City--including in Coney Island, Williamsburg, Henri Bendel's, and Central Park--and it takes advantage of that setting like few recent films. The streets of the city are another character as Molly and Ray slowly begin to develop a relationship that neither one ever dreamed would happen. The movie features support from Heather Locklear as Ray's very busy record executive mom, Donald Faison as Molly's party-loving music friend, and Jesse Spencer as Molly's musician boyfriend, who did all his own singing on the film and whose work appears on the soundtrack album.