It’s mommy dearest versus Mary Poppins

In the new film “Spanglish,” which opened Friday, Tea Leoni plays a monster: a blond, powerfully aerobicized, utterly fat-free Westside mommy named Deborah Clasky. She shames her overweight daughter, betrays her husband and is so self-involved that her own mother tells her that “your low self-esteem is just good common sense.”

And then there’s Flor, perhaps the loveliest, most soulful nurturer ever to grace Bel-Air. In the film, the beauteous Spaniard Paz Vega plays an illegal Mexican immigrant -- putatively the Claskys’ housekeeper, although she’s hardly shown laundering the Pratesi sheets or cleaning out the Sub-Zero refrigerator. Instead, she binds the wounds the mother inflicts on the family.

The same week that “Spanglish” opened, the smash TV show “Desperate Housewives” introduced the character of a beautiful and sweet nanny named Claire (played by Marla Sokoloff) whose mission is to restore sanity to the home of the frazzled, Ritalin-popping Lynette (Felicity Huffman), under siege from a brood of unruly boys.

According to the show’s creator, Marc Cherry, an upcoming story line “reveals the very sad truth that Claire is a better mother than Lynette is.” Upsetting in a different way, Cherry adds, will be Lynette’s creeping realization that her husband’s “eyes are drawn to Claire’s enormous breasts” -- a problem that also afflicts John Clasky, played by Adam Sandler, Deborah’s husband in “Spanglish.”

Clearly, there are wonderful nannies as well as selfish, narcissistic mothers out there. But in a world in which it’s considered politically incorrect to mock almost any group, there is one exception: the middle- to upper-class mother -- from the Westside of Los Angeles to the East Side of New York -- who dares to hire child care. In her latest on-screen incarnations, she is not just ridiculed, she is punished in an almost Dantesque fashion: by being shown in extremely unflattering contrast to her nanny, who is depicted as a more loving, far more functional human being.

The mom-with-help has become a caricature that reflects women’s anxiety about relying on other women for child-care help and society’s profound ambivalence about the whole arrangement. Not only is there fear that these professional-class mothers are abdicating their family responsibility -- whether they work or not -- the suggestion is that they are actually becoming incompetent to be parents at all.

It’s now the nanny, efficient yet loving -- and often gorgeous -- who appears to be the culture’s latest Superwoman. No wonder the biggest hit on the British stage is the new musical version of the classic “Mary Poppins,” the nanny who’s “practically perfect in every way.”

Consider also the dueling Fox and ABC shows “Nanny 911” and “Supernanny,” respectively, in which starchy child-care professionals arrive to knock some good common sense into befuddled and over-permissive American families.

“The nanny, particularly the British nanny, has universal appeal,” said “Nanny 911” executive producer Paul Jackson. “In a sense, she’s a mythical figure.” The nannies “give certainty and parameters and rules in the modern world, which has become unruly and troublesome.”

While the unscripted nanny shows don’t portray the fathers as any more competent than the mothers, in “Spanglish,” Sandler’s John Clasky is presented as cuddly and all but perfect. It’s the mom who’s part of an alarming class of buffed-up, de-feminized American women, described by the narrator as “afraid of everything associated with being curvaceous such as wantonness, lustfulness, sex, food and motherhood.”

Oddly, perhaps, there is one group claiming to be on the side of these new terror-moms: their creators, who profess affection and compassion for their characters. “Spanglish” writer-director James L. Brooks, who has a long track record of bringing to the screen flawed but appealing female characters, from Shirley MacLaine’s Aurora in “Terms of Endearment” to Holly Hunter’s tearful workaholic in “Broadcast News,” defended his latest film’s high-strung Deborah, who’s adrift after losing her job. “I do have compassion for the character,” he said. “I hope it’s in the film, even given her problems. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. ... She’s everywoman, reduced to raw nerves.”

Brooks disputed the idea that this type of mother is found only in the rich enclaves of Manhattan and Los Angeles. “I get a lot of, ‘I know someone just like her. She’s like my sister,’ ” he said. “Two nights ago at a screening in upstate New York, a woman started to say how much she recognized in her. [I said], ‘You’re on the verge of being the first woman to say, “That’s me”.’ ”

Nicola Kraus, coauthor of the bestselling 2002 novel “The Nanny Diaries,” also defended her unsympathetic matron, a character called Mrs. X, a selfish, prissy, Upper East Side mom who dodges her child’s embrace and goes to a spa while he’s suffering from a high fever. (“Where is the woman in this mother?” wonders the book’s unselfish nanny.)

Kraus said she believes such characters -- nonworking mothers who opt out of their roles as parents -- are very much a product of upper-crust Manhattan society. “To me, Mrs. X is the tragic figure of the novel. She wants to be loved and wants to please and is deeply lost at how to build love in her life. I found it desperately sad. Given the norms of her community, she has no reason to think she’s anything but a terrific mother. She is a victim of the entire system as much as [her son] is.”

But Allison Pearson, author of another bestselling novel that deals with a high-end mother on the verge of breakdown, “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” said she was dismayed when she read “The Nanny Diaries.”

“I thought the mother was such a vicious caricature,” she said. “Obviously, there must be a handful of people on the planet like that, but I thought, I’ve talked to hundreds and thousands of women and the majority of them are not these kinds of people.”

Pearson’s book offers a more sympathetic portrayal of a working mother who struggles -- not always successfully -- to balance career and caregiving. The nanny in her book is an essential member of the household, but she’s no paragon, sometimes flagrantly disregarding the mother’s instructions.

To Pearson, the relationship between nannies and mothers is “a very fraught business.” It’s unfair, Pearson said, to depict the mothers as relentlessly inadequate parents and relentlessly demanding employers, when in reality many go out of their way to make the relationship with the nanny work -- even in extreme circumstances. “A very, very senior woman in America told me her nanny had been stealing and the thefts were becoming more and more blatant. And she didn’t do anything about it. She would never put up with that in her office. But she did, because the idea of anything upsetting the children is unacceptable.”

Terry Press, head of marketing at DreamWorks SKG and the mother of young twins, agrees that many women are deeply concerned about maintaining a good work environment for their children’s caregivers. “That’s the big joke,” Press said. “If my nanny and my husband go overboard, which one do I save? ... Bully her? If I could, I’d like to make her tea and toast.”

But Lisa Loomer, who wrote the play “Living Out,” says good intentions on the part of mothers don’t always come across as the mothers may think. Her play, which appeared at Mark Taper Forum last year, deals with the relationship between mothers and nannies. Nancy is a well-to-do Santa Monica lawyer who leans on her nanny, Ana, so heavily to work late hours that the nanny is forced to neglect her own child, who literally dies.

“A lot of women felt, ‘I would never do that to the nanny.’ But I know people like that,” Loomer said. “I’ve heard things that really shock me, like ‘I’ll send mine over to you.’ And that’s slave talk. ‘Because she is my worker, I’ll decide what she does.’ ”

Loomer conceded that she thinks the nannies deserve more sympathy than the mothers. “We have problems of relative privilege. These women are working for utter survival,” she said. (In fact, Loomer’s play and Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change,” currently at the Ahmanson Theater, are two works that depict the grim struggle of many low-wage household workers.)

Christy Haubegger, the founder of Latina magazine and executive producer of “Spanglish,” who helped Brooks with the research for the film, said to focus on the wealthy mother misses the point of the movie. Responding to one critic’s characterization of “Spanglish” -- and the character of Deb in particular -- as “misogynistic,” Haubegger said: “Misogynistic? It shocks me. Why is Flor not a woman?”

Haubegger said at screenings she’s hosted for Latino audiences, women crowd the bathrooms afterward to wash off their dripping mascara, thrilled to have in Flor a sensitive and, in view, accurate portrayal of themselves: “I would encourage you to see the movie with Hispanic women. It’s a different experience. They don’t think it’s a movie about Deborah at all. Who cares about Deborah?”

Press, the DreamWorks SKG executive, sees the glorification of the nanny at the expense of the mother as a yearning for an idealized past.

“There is a glamorization of a traditional, cookies-and-milk, after-school type,” she said. “It’s in the culture.”

Press concedes that among those feeling that nostalgia are the working mothers themselves: “Working mothers feel that there was once a time in America when it did not take two incomes to survive. That’s really the thing that the culture is longing for.”

Author Pearson warns, however, that the sentimentalized past never existed. Pearson recalls that during her own childhood, her mother was so frustrated and depressed at being confined in the home that life improved significantly only after she finally decided to get a job.

“We shouldn’t forget that what came before was not ideal,” she said. “We’re in a transitional phase, aren’t we? We shouldn’t forget how short a period of time this experiment has been going on.”

Perhaps that’s why the subject of mothers who entrust their children to other women still triggers such deep emotions, from those who worry that their caregivers won’t be adequate, to those who fear their nanny will be more than adequate and will prove to be a potent rival for their children’s affections.

“It’s a little terrifying for mothers -- the whole idea that your nanny is the dream caregiver while you are constantly struggling to balance everything,” said Press. “That’s our own horror movie.”

And the stuff of comedy in the world of “Desperate Housewives.” “For us, the joke was, [the nanny] is so brilliant she makes Lynette feel even worse” about her mothering skills, said Cherry, the show’s creator. In fact, Lynette quickly becomes so threatened that she sabotages her children’s relationship with Claire.

“Here’s the good news,” Cherry said. “You so empathize with where she’s coming from at any moment that I don’t have any worries about it.”

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Rachel Abramowitz is a Times staff writer; Kim Masters is a regular contributor to The Times.