Chanel Boot Camp

Rating: 7/10 (5 July 2006)

This is a boot camp movie, like An Officer and A Gentleman, with Meryl Streep in the Lou Gosset, Jr. role. Trainee Anne Hathaway is given seemingly impossible assignments by this heartless, demanding mentor who is curious to see if the kid is smart enough and tough enough to learn the job and do it. Hathaway succeeds because she is smarter, tougher and more competitive than she likes to think she is. (After all, the kid didn't get to be editor in chief of her undergraduate paper simply on girlish charm and good looks). What pulls her in to Streep's world isn't really the clothes and the glamour. It's the pride in meeting impossible standards and showing the old bitch that she can take it all, get it done, and come back for more. Her reward is to know that she really is as good as the demands of the job require -- and those demands include believing in the job, not just doing it. In other words, Streep runs the same con on Hathaway that drill sergeants and law professors have been running for years, and she almost pulls it off.
The movie breaks down at the end because drill sergeant Streep doesn't pull it off, and her failure doesn't ring true. Hathaway's character couldn't be both as competitive as she is and as girly-naive as she is about the consequences of competition at the highest level, where there are a lot more butts than there are chairs to sit them in. It's as if Richard Gere, after winning Gosset's approval, had said, "Wait a minute. You mean I'll have to drop bombs on people when I'm a Navy pilot? I quit." Until then, though, DWP provides the pleasure of watching the old story of a rookie mastering a difficult, challenging craft and learning along the way that she has a lot more resources than she thought she had.