Movie Review - The Devil Wears Prada

Okay, so I said this would be tomorrow, and that was days ago. Sue me.

At the end of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ I turned to my friend Tammy and confessed I wanted to stand up in the theater and shout “I’m wearing Target shoes and proud of it!” After this film I have no interest in a career in fashion. Well, I didn’t have that prior to the movie but even less so now. It’s a little too cutthroat and shallow in some ways for me. (Then again, if you want to be honest, so is journalism. So there you go.)

Andy (Anne Hathaway) is just out of journalism school and living in New York with her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier), a chef. She’s generally rumpled and dreaming of a career at a big NYC paper but she needs a job. She goes to an interview for an assistant’s post, only to land as second assistant to Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep), the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine and known throughout the office as the Dragon Lady. Miranda and other staff members mock Andy’s clothes and hair until she seeks out Nigel, the art director (Stanley Tucci), for help. He puts her in designer wear (oh, the fabulous thigh high boots!! I have envy) and gets her hair cut. And of course, she looks smashing.

Still, the swanning out of a character seems to be Hathaway’s trademark, and it’s clear from Minute One the girl is adorable, so it’s a little surprising everyone makes fun of her, telling her size six is fat. (And I’m the Michelin man.) I’m even more surprised she is allowed to dress as she does for as long as she does, especially in the front office of a high profile fashion magazine, which must see many big-name clients daily.

The movie is formulaic to a degree, although charming, and has its flaws. It starts with a mistake, and that it’s Andy’s, colored my view of the film. Andy, an aspiring journalist, doesn’t do her homework before going to her interview, which is a journalistic Cardinal Sin. She doesn’t know who Miranda is, and more importantly, she doesn’t know of her reputation, which sets her up for humiliation, verbal abuse, and a 24-hour a day job with impossible requests (like fetching the script for Harry Potter book 7 before it’s published. I can tell you right now, there’s NO WAY that scenario would play out in real life. J.K. Rowling would sue.) And Andy is shocked by this behavior. Had she done her homework, she would have known what she was getting into, and probably refused. Then there would be no movie, I suppose.

Miranda is constantly on Andy’s phone, giving her orders and expecting miracles. When Andy's life starts to get out of control, her friends briefly try to call her on it, but while one is vaguely supportive because he likes fashion, the other flips out when she sees Andie talking to a cute guy (Simon Baker, and yes, he’s damn cute). Nate is suitably upset about the way things are spiraling out of control, and he’s the only one I really feel for. Nobody really tries to reach out to her, to understand what she’s going through and why. And while old Andy, in her comfortable sweatshirts, is what he wishes for, I can’t see why anyone would be upset with her for trying to look nice. The new Andy actually does look nice, and nobody really acknowledges that either. They treat it as though she’s pretending. Well, she’s Anne Hathaway. She’s cute. The cute clothes suit her. We can’t pretend she’s suddenly risen above herself –and them - just because she wants to wear nice dresses.

I get why Andy sticks with the job. She wants to stay there a year, to then move on to something better with this great experience under her belt. But she doesn’t really relay this to her friends or her family in a way that convinces me. I know why they’re furious – I would be too if one of my friends let herself be treated this way by a boss (and I’ve been furious with myself for sticking with a job I felt belittled me but that I felt I needed to stay in to have a roof over my head, so I’m already there when it comes to that motivation). But I would also better understand Andy’s motivations for taking the job in the first place if she was far behind on her rent (they hint at it but never work through it) or in other ways desperate need of a job, not living with her successful chef boyfriend in a cute apartment that, based on my experience with NYC (which is limited) they're probably paying $1500 for a month at least. Instead, her journalistic instincts abandon her and she becomes a virtual slave.

Still, Streep does a nice job showing some of the human side of Miranda, when she’s not asking Andy if she’s fallen down and smacked her little head. She has an early scene where she explains fashion to Andy, and it rings quite true – one of the few times I sided with her in the movie AND with the fashion industry. Emily Blunt is caustic but enjoyable as Assistant Number One and there are a few models and fashion icons who make appearances. The fashion references are fun (“How do you spell ‘Gabbana’?”) and I didn’t feel lost by them, and I have absolutely NO trouble saying I loved looking at the clothes and the shopping districts. Indeed, I found myself swooning over shots of Paris and some of Andy's clothes, and also wishing I could know what looked good on me and what didn’t. (Confession – I do like fashion, I’m just dumb about it. And I’m not a size six.)

Animal Trauma: None, unless you count the furs Miranda keeps tossing on Andy’s desk.

Overall: Formulaic but charming. Streep is admirably frosty and Hathaway capably adorable. I give it three roses out of five.