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The Devil Wears Prada |
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 Release Date: 06/30/06 (Future Release)
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, Simon Baker, Emily Blunt
Director: David Frankel
Rating: (PG-13) |
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Genre |
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Comedy, Drama |
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Running Time |
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106 min |
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Distributor |
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20th Century Fox |
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 Official Website |
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NEW YORK REVIEW
The film of Lauren Weisberger’s novel The Devil Wears Prada—a scantily clad revenge memoir of Weisberger’s time as Anna Wintour’s assistant at Vogue—is a fairy tale in which the good little aspiring-writer protagonist, Andrea (Anne Hathaway), is tempted by the girlie equivalent of George Lucas’s Dark Side: the wicked, fashion-obsessed queen (Meryl Streep) of a glossy monthly magazine and her mean, shallow minions. Hopelessly ethical and unmaterialistic, our heroine nonetheless proves that she can be a triumphant courtier, look better in couture than anyone at Vogue (I mean, Runway), and retain her commoner’s integrity. If there’s any drama here, it’s slender—maybe a size 2.
People who believe in simplicity and integrity do not make movies like The Devil Wears Prada, with its predictable Princess Diaries–goes–to–Condé Nast template, unearned moral superiority, ubiquitous pop-song-infused montages, and ugly-duckling heroine who is neither ugly nor a duckling. It’s bizarre when all the Runway employees wrinkle their noses at Andrea instead of realizing that, with her long legs and neck and skinny face and big, dark eyes, she’s pure Runway. Hathaway overdoes the girlish wonderment and isn’t up to her big, to-hell-with-the-devil scene, but she certainly carries off the clothes. They enhance her and damn her. On cue, her rumpled-dreamboat sous-chef boyfriend (Adrian Grenier) rejects her for becoming one of them and neglecting her friends—preposterous when you consider the hostagelike existence of restaurant underlings, as portrayed in Bill Buford’s Heat.
For all the movie’s dopiness, the director, David Frankel, knows how to accessorize. As the heroine’s snooty rival, the brilliant English actress Emily Blunt is a marvel at conveying the terror beneath the hauteur; Stanley Tucci makes the magazine’s gay art director a ghostly, fatalistic presence, a smart man who long ago stopped thinking for himself.
And Streep? She gives a fabulous minimalist performance. She’s not playing the brusque, speed-freaky Wintour, but a softer, more measured ogre, her silver hair brushed back, her anger signaled in the tiny tensing of a single facial muscle, her eviscerating dismissals fluted with an airy flick of the hand. In rare moments, she lets us see the child under the gorgon visage, but she doesn’t sentimentalize the woman. I’m not sure this Miranda makes as much psychological sense as the book’s Wintour dervish—but I wouldn’t want to work for either one.— Reviewed by David Edelstein, New York Magazine
PROFILE
The Very Good Girl: Anne Hathaway (June 26, 2006 issue of New York Magazine)
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