Review of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) by Sam B — 06 Mar 2015

I am one of the few people (and fewer men) who read The Devil Wears Prada before I watched it-once both existed. I did so within the last seven days, and so I can say with great confidence that these works have about as much in common as Carrie and She's All That. The book is a PTSD flashback without no taste but bile and no emotion but fury. The film reduces that to a perilous seduction.

Perhaps the most interesting find on the Devil's DVD was the featurette on its birth from the book. The author, Lauren Weisberger, is nowhere to be seen and it's revealed that several screenwriters took several years to deliver something that Hollywood could love and high fashion could favor. It also highlights just how much of the book's aesthetic got primped into something bearable, which the book just isn't. It ladles respect for the industry in at key points and spreads dollops of reliability all over Streep's Priestly.

The end result is conventional, nothing like the book, and nowhere near as potentially striking. It would have been bold to produce a screed against the powerful, a 90-odd-minute horror show in which no one is redeemed if you look closely enough. Instead, even biting Emily is given her Paris fashion castoffs and a chance to eat crow. Would I want to watch the book on the big screen? It would be worth seeing, once, just so I could know it's possible-it's evidently not.

Streep's Devil is palatable, and that's all show business and fashion are looking for most of the time. Art, it's not. Honest, it's not. But it is entertaining, and that's why people like it. For the record though, it took the movie to really lay fat comments on so thick. In Weisberger's account, Priestly frankly doesn't give a damn about the new Emily until the climax in Paris, and that's the whole point. We wind up with a tastier film, but wouldn't rancid be fascinating?