Review: The Devil Wears Prada

Probably not something readers would expect me to see, much less write about. What can I say? It was a movie I saw on a date last night and it just happened to be starting at the right time, plus Superman is long for a date movie and she hadn't seen the first Pirates of the Caribbean. Anyway, this really isn't just a chick flick, though it has a gooey center to it. Anne Hathaway plays sweater-clad, frumpy/pretty Northwestern grad (Midwest=good values, integrity) Andi, who improbably gets the coveted gig as Runway (read: Vogue) magazine editor Miranda Priestly (Streep)'s second assistant, learning the ropes from bitchy first assistant Emily, because Streep explains that the choices she made for assistant before in fashionable young women hadn't worked out well. But Andi isn't a protege she wants to mold, Pygmalion-style--she expects her to know what she's doing right from the start, which creates a lot of stress, as she doesn't know the fashion world at all. And of course, she's on call all the time, which soon threatens her relationship with boho chef boyfriend Nate, played by the handsome star of Entourage whose name I forgot. As the plot machinery clicks along, she must first make a careerist decision that alienates the people she cares about, then corrects herself to restore those relationships and her own sense of self. The plot mechanics get annoying when their familiarity is most obvious, but the direction is crisp, with good montages, attractive clothes and lively techno music and plenty of slashing lines from Streep, the Emily character, and Stanley Tucci's snarky but goodhearted art director, who does fill in as the Pygmalion role. While scenes like Andi's soulsearching walk through New York are as dull as every soulsearching walk in every other movie, there are some good scenes to combat it, like Andi meeting Miranda's challenge to produce copies of the unpublished seventh Harry Potter book for her two daughters, within an hour, or a smartly written scene where Andi sniggers at the Runway staff's fanaticism for fashion and is then schooled by Miranda in how the high fashion world has unwittingly informed and controlled even Andi's seemingly no frills choices. Just that one scene actually made me respect the world of haute couture much more than I had, and elevates the movie a little above junk Hathaway had been doing like Princess Diaries, though it wouldn't be accurate to call this quite an adult movie. Hathaway, whose work I hadn't seen before, not being a girl, is pretty appealing here. Streep is a broad character with just a shade more dimension than Glenn Close's Cruella de Vil, so I really would hate for her to get any nomination for this, but she is good and easily steals the movie from Hathaway whenever she's in it, which is often. Tucci is also broad but likeable. I had trouble with Andi's friends and boyfriend--the gay male friend is always in a suit, suggesting he might be a Wall Street broker or some other high pressure white collar business; the girl friend is an artist preparing for her first exhibition, and the boyfriend is a chef at some NYC eatery, and yet all three are always available to hang out and have drinks and dinner, with only Andi ever called away and made to look like a bitch for trying to succeed in her job. Does the boyfriend only have the lunch crowd? The boyfriend has what in other movies would be the girlfriend/wife part, being there at home, suffering, while the breadwinner has to work late and cancel plans. The fact that as a chef, he does the cooking, makes the gender reversal complete. Simon Baker, formerly of The Guardian, plays some hip freelance writer who hits on Andi, and he looks kind of cool some of the time but in other lighting his eyebrows and little eyes make him look really weird and unsexy. An enjoyable, forgettable film guys won't mind seeing.