Review of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) by Markb. — 21 Jul 2006

While reading Lauren Weisberger's semi-autobiographical account of an ambitious, impressionable young would-be journalist laboring for The Boss From Hell, I mentally pictured demon employer Miranda Priestly as not being pictured at all in the inevitable movie version.

Like Niles Crane's ultra-high-maintenance first wife Maris on TV's Frasier, Miranda's evil seemed so completely unbridled that any actress, no matter, how good, would seem to merely trivialize it.

Then comes Meryl Streep's delicious, stunningly effective minimalist interprestation of a powerhouse who changes lives, fortunes and fashion lines with the merest head nod or eyebrow flicker to show me how gratifying it can be to be wrong every now and then! Streep has compared her approach to much of Clint Eastwood's deceptively soft-spoken but deadly screen persona, but I'd liken it more to Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter; both the Runway magazine editor and the mass murderer are at their most seemingly placid right before chowing down on your liver! The Silence of the Lambs analogy holds up in more ways than one: both films deal with young professional women in danger of being completely absorbed by the monsters they must deal with in order to move up in their chosen fields, but Anne Hathaway's Andy Sachs is in far greater danger of beeing completely tainted by the encounter than Jodie Foster's neophyte FBI agent Clarice Starling ever was.

Unfortunately, Devil (the movie) flinches a bit and compromises Devil (the book) by humanizing Miranda in one scene and having her perform a genuinely decent act in another, but this is still good, glossy fun, also largely due to excellent support by Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt, the latter pulling off the small miracle of really getting you to care about her character even though she treats Andy with nothing but condescension.

Wisely, the movie deemphasizes Andy's virtuous but dull friends from the outside word, knowing that the Runway workplace is really where the action is, but its message is clear: there's definitely something wrong with an employer and work environment that convinces any woman with Anne Hathaway's body that she's "fat"! And while it's impossible to imagine the lovely Princess Diaries ingenue as unattractive no matter WHAT she's wearing, it's obvious that Andy is infinitely cuter, more natural looking and a far nicer person in the blue cotton sweater she wears in her opening scenes than the chic designer attire she's later pressured into stockpiling.

The Devil Wears Prada asks a lot of pertinent questions about QVC America's willingness to allow itself to be manipulated into burning out its Visa cards year after year by such nasty, manipulative "style-makers" as Miranda and her ilk, but one could, to be completely fair, equally question the ethics of Andy's working-girl togs, which most likely were made in Indonesian swaetshops where the children employed there make barely enough per hour to get a Butterfinger bar out of an American vending machine.