A Ross Hunter movie for the 21st Century

Rating: 3/10 (10 July 2006)

Did the makers of this candy-coated confection actually think they were saying something wicked or insightful about the fashion industry? If so, they've been watching too many old movies, for the movie's digs are toothless and its morality is straight-down-the-middle-America. It's like a Ross Hunter or Doris Day sex comedy from the early 1960s, or "That Girl," with the honest young thing conquering New York and staking out a fabulous wardrobe without ever falling for the lies and false values of the high-fashion milieu (though the movie certainly ogles that world enough). Yes, we love Meryl Streep's way with a line -- as an Anna Wintour-like gorgon, sort of an update of Kay Thompson's turn in "Funny Face," she purrs her insults with brilliant underplaying, like a latter-day George Sanders. And we love Stanley Tucci, as a flamboyant, frustrating, but invariably right veteran of Seventh Avenue (we've all worked with somebody like this). We don't even mind Anne Hathaway, though we've seen this character before in literally hundreds of movies. But the utter predictability is a big letdown, as is an otherwise colorless supporting cast saying witless things on Manhattan and Paris streets. And the movie feels ambivalent about the industry: It ridicules the high-pressure environment yet also kind of admires it. Meryl has a big scene tearing down Anne Hathaway's fashion sensibility that the movie actually seems to side with. I find it infuriating that anybody would care this much about the nonsense of what next season's big fashion will be, but if they're going to put this world on screen, they should have its denizens say and do more interesting things. As it is, the only real suspense is what outfit Anne Hathaway will show up in in the next scene.