[5.5/10] *The Devil Wears Prada* is a movie at war with itself. It wants to critique the fashion industry but also bends over backwards to defend and glamorize it. It wants to tell a story of corruption and recovery, but also make sure the protagonist remains likable by not ever doing anything especially wrong. It wants to populate a film full of monsters, but also wants us to feel bad for them when they’re undermined or double-crossed.
The end result is a profoundly muddled movie that is all over the place in what it’s trying to say or make the audience feel in any given moment.
Taken at its most charitable, one could argue that the film is aiming to capture the complexity of these industries and experiences by presenting both their merits and drawbacks. But its points are too facile, its narrative turns too baffling or underbaked, to ever truly achieve that beyond, true to form, the most superficial level.
Again, trying to be charitable, I think the film wants the audience’s impression of fashion tyrant Miranda Priestly, the industry she rules, and the workplace environment she fosters, to parallel that of Andy Sachs, the fresh-faced protagonist subject to Priestly’s cruel whims and malign influence. Andy starts a skeptic, is eventually seduced by this world, only to wake up when she realizes the cravenness it provokes in all who are consumed by it. A defter movie could lead us to go through the same “doubt, buy in, then escape” emotionally that Andy does literally.
But the construction of *The Devil Wears Prada* is so janky, its different parts so random and undermotivated, that none of the trajectory clicks into place. At once, the cruelty of everyone at Runway magazine is too severe to warm to them, and the defenses (and presentation) of fashion so swift and lyrical that it’s hard to take the comparatively half-critique seriously. Meanwhile, the reasons behind Andy’s fall and recovery are so disconnected and unsatisfying that, ironically given the mean quips that never stop coming, the character’s journey never has any weight.
There’s a ten minute stretch in the film’s first act that's a metonym for these larger problems. Andy is having dinner with her father. Miranda interrupts with a phone call demanding that Andy give up her evening to find her boss a flight home despite a hurricane. When Andy can't, Miranda dresses her down for it, calling her “as disappointing as anyone else,” after calling her fat yet again. And when Andy complains to Nigel, he accuses her of whining about a job a million others would kill for and blames her stumbles on her not trying hard enough. The solution is the standard Hollywood makeover that turns the heads of the catty bitches who’d been slagging her moments earlier.
It’s everything wrong with this film (or, at least, most of it) in miniature. Miranda’s horrible behavior is justified as her “doing her job” and excused given the supposed importance of the work she oversees. Andy herself states that she’s failing at the job due to her not trying at it, despite a montage *right before this sequence* that shows Andy busting her hump and mastering her duties as Miranda’s assistant. And the basis for Nigel’s accusation that Andy’s lacking in effort and has earned this derision is not some legitimate mistake or negligence on Andy’s part, but rather her inability to fulfill a literally impossible request.
Everything about this is at best, miscalibrated, and at worst, outright contradictory. That's before Nigel’s poetic defense of fashion, which is problematic on its own terms, and even worse as a rationalization for mistreatment at the hands of yet another “tortured genius”, but which, if anything, lands too well given a dynamite delivery from Stanley Tucci who steals every scene he’s in. It’s hard to take any initial or closing critiques of this culture as seriously when you have your best performers giving your film’s best speeches in support of it. (And that goes double for Miranda’s “cerulean” monologue earlier in the picture.)
And the solution to all of this? The thing that's supposed to make it all better and show Andy’s recommitment to Runway Magazine and all it represents? The thing that finally gives her a one-up on the mean girls who’ve picked away at her since she started the job? It’s nothing internal or personal; it’s just Andy stepping out in some designer outfit fresh out of the ragged teddy bear navy. The movie is as guilty as its villains in prioritizing the external over the internal when trying to convey its scrambled ideas.
That solution, in and of itself, is indicative of two major pathologies that run through nearly the whole film. First and foremost, *The Devil Wears Prada* wants to have its cake and eat it too. Andy starts out “frumpy” and “fat”; her corruption is signified by picking out her own designer outfits and bragging about losing two sizes, and her recovery is signposted by her returning to her old wardrobe and style. The film seems to want to convey that this whole scene is toxic, and that Andy saves herself by exempting herself from it.
But in addition to Miranda and Nigel’s well-acted and well-written defenses of that toxicity (which the movie also seems to buy?), this is an intrinsically glossy film. Wherever it starts, and wherever it lands, the vast majority of the film’s runtime is spent showing impossibly glamorous people doing impossibly luxurious things in impossibly sleek settings. Any whiff of criticism is counterbalanced by the loving and lavish way the world of fashion is presented visually and tonally throughout the film.
In an odd way, it makes *The Devils Wears Prada* a stealthy precursor to *The Wolf of Wall Street*, in the sense that it inadvertently champions the erstwhile villain it means to dress down, and tells the audience, “Stop admiring this thing with present to you with untold cinematic splendor.”
Here’s where I admit my biases. I have major problems with the fashion industry. An entire commercial sector, subject to the capricious whims of a small cadre of tastemakers like Miranda’s real life equivalent, devoted to measuring value in the superficial over the substantive, selling that cache at a steep markup, and promoting unhealthy body images and eating disorders in the process, is a travesty in my eyes.
The other side of the coin is that much of the same can be said of the film and television industry, which I’ve nevertheless devoted much of my creative life to. More to the point, I am simply not the target audience for this material. I’m annoyed, not enamored, by the presentation, and miffed, rather than mesmerized, by the characters’ defenses. That means I’m already primed not to enjoy much of this, in a way a neutral likely viewer wouldn’t be, which isn’t the movie’s fault, even if I think the film’s visuals and tone are at odds with its message.
But the second major pathology is about storytelling rather than subject matter: all of Andy’s alleged transformation is outer, rather than inner. For a story that's supposedly about her falling to the darkside before pulling back from the brink, she never really changes that much, and never really does anything too bad. The change in clothes is about as deep as *The Devil Wears Prada* gets in terms of character trajectory.
Sure, at one point Andy champions the merits of the movie’s ersatz version of *Vogue* to her friends, and tells the suave predatory douche who pursues her that no one would blink at Miranda’s actions if she were a man. But for the most part, Andy is the same bright-eyed, upbeat, trying-her-best aspiring professional in the middle of the film that she is at the beginning or the end. Her demeanor and disposition never really change, which neuters a story nominally about losing and then recovering your true self.
It’s key to the film’s inherent tension, of wanting to make Andy a relatable or aspirational character that audiences can step into the dowdy and/or stylish shoes of, while also wanting to show her being corrupted by this malevolent influence into losing her integrity. The two projects are all but incompatible, and so the character journey is ultimately unsatisfying.
Andy has two allegedly grave misdeeds in the film that are supposed to show how far she’s fallen. The first is her missing her boyfriend’s birthday because Miranda demanded she come to a work event when the other assistant is ill. And maybe here’s where my values differ from the film’s, because from my perspective, sometimes young professionals in big roles have to fulfill demanding and ill-timed obligations in order to succeed at (and to keep( their jobs. It’s not fun, and it’s fair to explore how that can be tough on a couple, and it doesn’t justify professional abuse, and there’s some lines that have to be drawn. But your grown-ass boyfriend’s birthday is not one of them, and it’s weird, at best, to suggest she’s losing her soul for what seems (to me at least) like an unfortunate but understandable situation that isn’t her fault.
The second is more significant, and it’s Andy agreeing to accompany Miranda to Paris Fashion Week, usurping her coworker Emily who’s been talking and dreaming and starving herself for this trip since Andy started. It is presented as this great betrayal, and a sign that Andy’s heart has started to blacken as much as Miranda’s.
Except there’s just a few problems with that framing. This isn’t presented as simply as “You go instead of Emily” or even “You go or I fire you.” It’s presented as “You go or I blackball you from the whole industry.” You can make the argument that it’s still worth giving up not just your job, but also your dream, if it would mean crushing the dreams of someone else. But the other issue is that Emily has done nothing but insult and demean and be absolutely wretched to Andy from the minute she walked through the doors of Runway, so why in god’s name should Andy show this woman who’s been an unrepentant jerk to her this entire time any loyalty?
And through it all, Andy graciously tries to turn down the invitation and send Emily in her stead, and when that's impracticable, is nothing but rueful and apologetic with Emily, despite her counterpart having done little to earn such compassion. Andy has to remain likable throughout, and she’s essentially forced into any missteps, so it becomes hard to buy any purported slide toward darkness.
It marks a particular contrast when Miranda holds onto her position at Runway despite an attempted coup by screwing poor Nigel out of his dream job so that she can sideline a rival. The mercenary, unrepentant nature of Miranda’s freely-made decisions that hurt a longtime loyal supporter are a far cry from Andy being effectively strong-armed into supplanting a mean girl who regularly picked on her, and it’s strange for the movie to try to compare the two.
The best spin, and I think the one the film halfway intends, is the idea that Andy is on a slippery slope. The actions that supposedly justify the “You’re becoming like me” pronouncement are thinner than the starving models whose self-harm is nevertheless lionized. But there’s a compelling idea at the heart of the film’s climax.
This road leads you down one of two paths: either becoming a heartless monster like Miranda and using your employees and friends like disposable pawns, or becoming a deluded sucker like Nigel and hanging on forever waiting like Godot for a crumb of loyalty and consideration from a woman who expects it but will never return it. There’s something there, and I wish the film did a better job building to that commendable climax and rounding out Andy’s rushed recovery.
Even then, that cinch of the film requires you to sympathize with a slate of utterly unlikable characters. For the turn in the story to work, you need to worry about the leadership for Miranda’s sake, despite her being utterly vindictive and unreasonable with everyone in her orbit. To lament poor Nigel’s untenable position, you have to forget that he spends much of the movie fat-shaming (and regular shaming) Andy like everyone else. For Andy’s choice to be questionable, Emily has to come across as something other than an entitled mean girl.
And that's before you get to the roster of Andy’s cardboard cutout friends, her obvious douche of a suitor, and her barely-sketched boyfriend. (Incidentally, you think the disposable boyfriend would understand the pressure Andy’s under given him working in the high-stress New York City restaurant scene, but that's the least of the film’s miscalibration problems.)
So how does any of this hold together? The answer is that Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci give incredible performances that almost single-handedly justify the movie’s existence.
Part of the problem with the film’s attempt to critique Miranda Priestly is that Streep is completely captivating in the role. It is an understated performance, and yet Streep is magnetic in how she holds position with her presence. Her smallest and subtlest changes in expressions speak volumes. And when the time comes to humanize this monster, to show vulnerability or the cracks of a real person behind the icy veneer, she nails these scenes without ever overdoing it. Her acting alone gives the character a depth and dimension that the janky narrative doesn’t otherwise earn.
The same goes for Tucci’s Nigel. Despite partaking in the casual cruelty that is the currency of the movie, Tucci brings a warmth and an arch sensibility to the role that manages to earn a sense of tragedy the script can't otherwise justify. His role is a comparatively small one, but he makes the absolute most out of it, and *The Devil Wears Prada* soars on the back of his performance, even when Nigel ought to be as contemptible as the rest of them.
That just leaves Anne Hathaway as the main character.She does fine work in the role but plays the umpteenth “young woman takes on challenging job in the big city” protagonist. The best you can say is that her amiable performance takes a character who could be annoying in how off-the-shelf she is, and at least livens Andy to the point where her presence in the story is never unwelcome, even if her road from beginning to end is rocky as hell.
Together, they practically rescue a film that, on paper, should crumple under its own weight due to the weak conflicts and garbled messaging at the center of the picture. This is all to say nothing of the movie’s unchallenged body-shaming. That too is apart from its facile take on integrity versus pragmatism. And that's even regardless of the bewildering fact that the film’s ultimate, damning critique of Miranda hinges not on her daily abuse of her employees or the toxicity of the industry she reigns over, but rather her bog standard movie villain prioritization of business over friendship.
Instead, it’s the thicket of contradictions that sink *The Devil Wears Prada* in a sea of designer labels and cliches. The film wants you to lament Andy’s fall while barely being willing to show her stumbling. It wants you to recognize the flaws in industry and culture Miranda represents while also presenting them in their most flattering form. Most of all, it wants you to see this spackled-together series of paradoxical points amid a pristine presentation, and not see that the emperor has no clothes.
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