From rags to witches ...

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2006)

To the vast number of people of the world, what is called "high fashion" is nothing more than a trivial pursuit for the very rich and very gullible. It is an industry devoted to spending huge sums of money to create exotic, often hideous, clothing that few can afford and even fewer can actually wear. But according to various characters in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, fashion isn't so much of an industry as it is an art form. And not just the design and the creation of the clothing itself, but its presentation in word and image, as well as its promotion as a means of shaping and advancing a culture. Like some sort of stylistic Reaganomics, the god-awful million-dollar gowns and garments being pasted onto stick-figure models on the runways of Paris and Milan today may someday, eventually, have some effect on what average Americans will happily buy off the clearance rack at Wal-mart.
Maybe. Maybe not.
But THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA does seem to suggest two things with reasonable confidence. One, the people involved in the fashion industry do totally believe that what they do is important and that minor details such as the hue of a blouse or the hem line of a skirt has meaningful consequences. And two, those who control the industry are so rarefied and isolated from reality that they can't comprehend just how meaningless those consequences really are.
The backdrop for PRADA is Runway magazine, a Vogue-like industry bible ruled with cold-blooded self-assurance by editor Miranda Priestly (brilliantly played with self-assured cold-bloodedness by Meryl Streep). The goal of the magazine it would seem is to visually strive for female perfection and if that isn't enough the magazine also prides itself on featuring the works of celebrated writers and photographers. Curiously, when a magazine such as Playboy defends its existence, it will be in defense of the search for female perfection, with the works of celebrated writers and photographers tossed in for good measure. Clothed or unclothed, do we seem to have competing styles of pornography at play? Who is objectifying women more? At least Playboy is thrifty enough to forego the cost of expensive wardrobes.
To some extent, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA is a remake (a designer knockoff?) of the 1957 musical FUNNY FACE, wherein bookworm Audrey Hepburn finds herself transformed into a butterfly by almost accidentally being seduced into the superficial world of high fashion by photographer Fred Astaire. This time around it's Anne Hathaway; she plays a wannabe journalist who rather unbelievably finds herself to be the second assistant to Streep's maven of style. Arguably, PRADA could have been about any business, since the focus of the story is on dehumanizing corporate ethics, the downsizing of personal integrity and other issues dealt with previously in films from EXECUTIVE SUITE and THE APARTMENT to NETWORK and SWIMMING WITH SHARKS. But by placing PRADA in a world primarily ran by and catering to women (and a few gay men), the film challenges the naive notion that women would do it all so much differently if they were in power. And tellingly, for a film about fashion, it offers precious few glimpses of style, beauty or elegance, the very elements with which the characters justify their existence. Hard edged and icy, PRADA has more in common with David Mamet's brutal GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS than with the joyous glamour of Stanley Donen's FUNNY FACE; no one so much as hums a Gershwin tune.
PRADA's focus is on Hathaway, who as the lamb among the wolves learns the value of being a sheep in wolf's clothing -- though admittedly, the wolves dress quite well. But just as Priestly sets the style and the tone of the fashion world, that job falls to Streep in the movie. Streep manages to be coolly hilarious and coldly horrifying, creating a career-woman monster that falls somewhere between Martha Stewart and Cruella De Vil -- not that that is such a wide gap. A part that could have been played quite successfully as broad comedy (think Sigourney Weaver in WORKING GIRL), instead is granted surprising depth by Streep, even though she barely changes facial expressions throughout. When the character so much as flirts with being sympathetic or vulnerable, Streep summarily discards such emotions as if they were particularly unflattering rhinestone accessories. Unlike this season's collection, her performance will be a perennial favorite, one not likely to soon go out of fashion.