The Devil Wears Prada

The story here is familiar: an idealistic college graduate goes to the big city with dreams of becoming a writer or artist or designer or public servant or whatever and is waylaid, diverted, by ambition, power, wealth, sex. The graduate turns away from loved ones and friends, is caught up in the turmoil of ambition and greed, compromises personal standards, only to suffer some reversal or enlightenment that suddenly reveals the folly and error of the course taken. Just before it is too late, the errant traveler gives up errant ways and returns to the folds of friendship, family, and personal ideals.

This is the story in The Devil Wears Prada. The problem is that none of it seems to mean much. The figure of the prodigal wayfarer is really just an excuse for a film about the fashion industry, with beautiful models, swank clothing, and runaway egos. Ann Hathaway plays the errant idealist, Andy Sachs. Meryl Streep plays the arrogant, monomaniacal fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly, who with one upturned lip can make or break an entire line of clothing and its designer. She makes and destroys careers and treats everyone around her like serfs.

Streep is one of those rare actresses who can so fully and totally inhabit a role that her real self, her personality as Meryl Streep the human being—if she really has a personality—wholly fades away. When she appears on talk shows, or when she is interviewed, she comes across as unremarkable, somewhat awkward and goofy, articulate and intelligent, but untouched by genius or celebrity or ego or the star-studded atmosphere of Hollywood and the American film industry (this could well be an illusion, of course). I’ve often wondered whether her lack of effect is a consequence of how she inhabits her roles—she reserves her force of personality for those roles, not for herself, her own life.

In The Devil Wears Prada Streep is not challenged by a demanding role. She merely has to underplay the part, with contempt and sarcasm and Machiavellian ruthlessness. Sachs is sent by a talent agency to interview for the position of personal assistant to Miranda Priestly. Everyone at the magazine sneers at her—she dresses like a college student, wears the wrong sort of shoes, and is a size 6 rather than a size 3 or 2. When Priestly actually hires her, everyone is astonished and horrified. The focus of the film is on whether Sachs will succeed as Priestly’s assistant, and whether Priestly will ever show any vestiges of humanity.

There comes a moment of transformation in the film when Andy Sachs suddenly realizes what it will take for her to succeed in her job. The moment is sudden and inexplicable, really, and is mainly manifest in how she begins to dress fashionably. The fact that this transformation really didn’t make sense doesn’t matter because the film as a whole doesn’t matter.

The film works on the assumption that all of us will recognize the hollow egotism and shallowness of the fashion industry. It also works on the assumption that we’ll be fascinated by that industry and its beautiful emaciated models and their expensive clothing and lifestyle. Because that is, after all, what this film is all about. When Andy tells Priestly that she does not believe she wants the life of wealth and beauty and glamor that is associated with the fashion industry, Priestly scornfully admonishes her, “Oh, don't be silly - EVERYONE wants this. Everyone wants to be us.” The point of the film is Andy Sach’s realization that, after all, she doesn’t want that life. Once again, this moment of transformation, like the earlier one, is not quite credible. The notion that this film is about Andy Sach’s redemption as a human being is just not convincing.

I admired Streep’s acting in this film but really did not like the character she played (how could anyone like that character?). There are two brief moments—one a moment of personal distress for Miranda Priestly, another a moment when she glimpses and recognizes Andy Sachs across the street — where Streep though brief facial expression gives humanity and depth to her character. These moments, compelling as they are, don’t really make sense because they are basically inconsistent with the character established in the film. But thank God they are there!

Hathaway in her small role in Brokeback Mountain gave promise of becoming much more of an actress than the two-dimensional princess roles she played in such films as The Princess Diaries. Here she returns to that juvenile superficiality.