"The Devil Wears Prada"

Anne Hathaway is Patricia Field's latest fashion victim in this limp semi-satire.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Meryl Streep, Reviews

Andy (Anne Hathaway, left), Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) and Emily (Emily Blunt).

June 30, 2006 | David Frankel's "The Devil Wears Prada" is probably supposed to be half fashion fantasy, half satire of the fashion world. What a drag that it's not enough of either. Its heroine, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), is a sweet, cornfed, non-fashion-obsessed recent college graduate who miraculously (and inexplicably) lands a job as an assistant to the most formidable fashion-magazine editor in the land, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). The magazine is called Runway (read: Vogue), and when Andy shows up for her first day of work, she's wearing the kind of college-girl garb that was out of fashion 20 years ago, a crewneck sweater and plaid-skirt get-up that might have looked OK for cycling around the Wellesley campus circa 1965. Miranda and Andy's snobby, recently promoted co-worker, Emily (Emily Blunt), scrutinize her, their nostrils flaring with disgust, as if her offense were more olfactory than visual.

In the code of mainstream filmmaking -- a code that offers pleasure as often as disappointment -- that must mean that Andy will undergo some sort of fabulous fashion transformation: Soon, we'll get to see this already astonishing-looking girl in the most beautiful clothes in the world, put together with the innate style we just know lurks inside her, ready to blossom. (To dip even a toe into the fantasy that "The Devil Wears Prada" presents, we need to ignore the fact that Andy is extraordinarily easy on the eyes to begin with.) We'll also get to relish Miranda's pure evil: How can we not sympathize with poor Andy, the ink barely dry on her freshly minted college degree, as she runs endless menial errands that often keep her on call until 2 a.m. (among them, fetching lattes that must still be steaming hot by the time they reach Miranda's lips)? Miranda rarely even calls Andy by her own name, preferring to call her by the name of her old assistant: To her, all underlings are interchangeable.

All of that stuff should be great fun. It should also help us work up at least a mild lather of outrage: To an extent, "The Devil Wears Prada" is an accurate reflection of workplace reality, at least in the magazine-publishing world, in that now more than ever, kids just out of college are forced to work at menial jobs that may not help them develop the skills they need. The harsher reality is that most recent college grads who hope to work in journalism have to take unpaid internships to get any experience at all. At least Andy gets a salary -- admittedly a tiny one -- for fetching all those lattes. And then there are all the glorious "free" clothes she gets to wear (more on these later). The violin of pity we're expected to play for Andy's plight gets tinier and tinier.

But even if we're not expecting strict adherence to realism in "The Devil Wears Prada" -- and we shouldn't -- the movie never quite finds its footing, or its tone. Frankel has directed numerous episodes of "Sex and the City," and he also made the sweetly entertaining 1995 comedy "Miami Rhapsody." "The Devil Wears Prada" is based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger, who drew from her own personal crypt of horror: She herself formerly worked for the infamously demanding editor of Vogue, Anna Wintour. But Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna rarely hit the right beats. The arc of Miranda and Andy's relationship needs to have some of the same rhythms of romantic comedy: These two are never going to fall in love, but they at least deserve some banter, and the script deprives them of it. Mostly, we're asked to feel great sympathy for Andy because her situation is so far from her hopes and desires. Andy wants to be a "real" writer, not a fashion type, and she shows obvious disdain for her co-workers at the magazine, having decided she's above it all. And while her co-workers are pretty nasty, she's really just engaging in unflattering self-pity for being stuck at the bottom of the food chain.

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