The Devil Wears Prada
“The Devil Wears Prada” isn’t inconsequential because it’s about the fashion industry. It’s inconsequential because it sets its dramatic parameters so narrowly it has nowhere to go. The only conflict the movie can muster is professional life versus personal life, embodied wanly by the hero, Andy Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway. Andy, an aspiring journalist, takes a job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the fearsome editor of a fashion magazine called Runway. There, she faces a series of dilemmas to which she can respond either by being a jerk to her friends and family or by refusing to allow Miranda to control her every waking moment. Hathaway is pleasant but tame: She shows little sass and few quirks, and Andy’s worst failures are far from spectacular. Hathaway always allows Andy’s essential decency to shine through, leaving little suspense about the choices she’ll ultimately make.
Meryl Streep, unsurprisingly, does more nuanced work as Miranda. She brings a calm, businesslike ferocity to a woman whose sadism is always rooted in a desire to find the greatness in herself and her underlings. I can see why Miranda wasn’t the hero of the novel on which “The Devil Wears Prada” is based: On the page, I can’t imagine how anyone could empathize with her. Yet Streep makes you wish the movie were all about Miranda. She makes the title inaccurate: If anything, a layabout writer played by Simon Baker is more dangerous, a Mephistopheles in Gucci. Too bad goody-goody Hathaway can’t convey the devil in Andy’s soul.
LISTEN: The Devil Wears Prada