The Devil Wears Prada is beyond criticism. If you don’t love every single minute of it, there’s probably something wrong with you. There hasn’t been a movie like this one in decades, a glossy spectacle about an eager young thing who comes to New York to make it in the Big City and emerges after a single year sadder and wiser and, of course, a raging success story. Though the year is nominally full of trauma and heartbreak, through it all our naive but intrepid heroine Andy Sachs is actually having the time of her life–and my life, and your life, and just about anybody else’s life. She learns how to wear haute couture, how to navigate the hazardous shoals of the dog-eat-dog workplace, and how to look absolutely spectacular in various Manhattan and Paris locations. And Andy does all this while remaining a nice, sweet person.
The only difference between The Devil Wears Prada and predecessor films from the 1950s like The Best of Everything and How to Marry a Millionaire is that our heroine doesn’t end up married to a really swell guy who saves her from spinsterhood. But listen, she’s 22 years old and, these days, Hollywood doesn’t marry off 22-year-old girls, even when they have really cute chef boyfriends who stay up late making them grilled pecorino cheese sandwiches. And if he’s not good enough, how about the hot and sexy young novelist who reads all her clips, listens to her bellyache about her job, and shares a huge piece of plot-altering gossip with her after a saucy Gallic romp in a Left Bank suite?
You’ve heard, perhaps, that The Devil Wears Prada is a portrait of a monstrous New York boss–and not just any monstrous New York boss, but the notoriously abusive editrix of Vogue, Anna Wintour. Certainly, the novel on which the movie was based takes a hatchet to Wintour, as our intrepid heroine Andy finally exits her horrific job at Runway magazine by screaming “F– you” at her evil boss in front of Parisian paparazzi. The Wintour character, Miranda Priestly, eminently deserves her assistant’s violent imprecations, since she has spent 412 pages behaving in an absolutely wretched and selfish fashion toward Andy and all the less powerful, less wealthy, and more desperate people in her employ.
The novel’s author, Lauren Weisberger, did something valuable by publishing The Devil Wears Prada, and not just because the book made her rich and famous. She put monster bosses everywhere on notice: Be a bully and do evil to your powerless underlings and one day one of them might write a barely disguised novel about you that will make you a laughingstock. The Devil Wears Prada isn’t a good book, but it might be a revolutionary one–a kind of negative etiquette manual of immense force.
The key to the movie’s success is that it defangs Miranda Priestly. As played by Meryl Streep, Miranda isn’t really a monster, just a force of nature with a Machiavellian streak. Her major defect is that she drops her coat on poor Andy’s desk as though she were Nacho Libre bodyslamming a dwarf wrestler. Even Miranda’s nuttiest and most impossible demands–like insisting that Andy procure a typescript of a new Harry Potter novel for her daughters to read a year before publication– don’t seem so impossible or nutty when Andy succeeds in fulfilling them. Isn’t Miranda just demonstrating that if you challenge your eager young workers, they will move heaven and earth for you?
Even better, from a clothing-porn point of view, is how Miranda’s contempt for Andy’s affectless fashion sense causes the young woman to plead for a makeover from the imperiously queenly fashion director of the magazine (an amazing Stanley Tucci, who gives new life to the sibilant “s”). In 30 seconds, in the lissome personage of the bright young actress Anne Hathaway, Andy becomes the second coming of Audrey Hepburn–this time with cleavage.
Director David Frankel and scenarist Aline Brosh McKenna seem to have taken their creative inspiration not from Weisberger but, rather, from the vicious attack on Weisberger’s book published in the New York Times Book Review by a former subaltern of Anna Wintour’s named Kate Betts–who herself became well-known as a difficult boss during her tenure at the helm of Harper’s Bazaar.
“Having worked at Vogue myself for eight years and having been mentored by Anna Wintour, I have to say Weisberger could have learned a few things in the year she sold her soul to the devil of fashion for $32,500,” Betts wrote in one of the most inadvertently revelatory paragraphs ever published by the Times. “[Weisberger] had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises in a business that exerts an enormous influence over women, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly.”
To which pathological pathos one might appropriately respond: Do “isolation and pressure” really give Wintour-Priestly the right to scream at her hundred-hour-a-week assistant because she herself forgot to renew her own children’s passports? Does the insanely trivial act of deciding whether magenta or taupe is the color for February afford anyone the psychic leeway to act like Catherine the Great? No matter. Unlike the book, the movie is chock-full of the stuff Betts demanded–stuff about what it costs Miranda Priestly to be Miranda Priestly, and how sad and lonely her life is. This allows Meryl Streep to seem oddly lovable, especially since she clearly likes Andy as much as we do. Everyone’s happier, including the audience, to discover that the devil is really an angel in disguise.
John Podhoretz, a coulumnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
