Intellectually muddled but not without charm,

Rating: 5/10 (1 August 2006)

"The Devil Wears Prada" is cut from the same cloth as "Sabrina" and "Funny Face," two beguiling Audrey Hepburn vehicles of the 50's in which America's most beloved gamine changes before our eyes from a wallflower to a swan. In due time, she falls in and out of love and samples the delights of the Big Apple and Paris. These movies succeeded where "Prada" fails, because they had a clear story line and point of view, although not a very emancipated one. At their most basic level, they're about Cinderella going to the ball and finding her prince. And, like "Prada," they're about the happiness that money can buy you when you're dressed in haute couture; visually, they're valentines to the good life and the sophistication of the big city.
While "Prada" is descended from this tradition, its plot is straight off the Lifetime Channel: how do you have a personal life when you give your all to a job? What makes "Prada" problematic is that it sends mixed messages about the significance of that job--being a go-fer to the Queen Bee of Vogue--making it seem silly, then incredibly important and then worth chucking at the end for no reason at all.
Initially, the wide-eyed protagonist Andy Sachs (Ann Hathaway) sees her boss as Ivana the terrible and her co-workers as anorexic fashion victims. Then, in what is supposed to be a pivotal scene, Andy has an epiphany as her boss Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep) points out in a long speech that the very color of the schlumpy sweater Andy is wearing was blessed by Priestley three years ago. The suggestion is that all along Andy,too, has been a fashion victim--just an unwitting one.
The problem with this analysis of the fashion food chain is that it's simply not true. There was a time when the fashion doyennes of New York could announce trends and make models' careers, but nowadays they're falling over themselves trying to get Gwyneth or Natalie or Julia on their covers. Fashion trends are as likely to start in the hood as they are on Seventh Avenue. No one waits with bated breath for Vogue to come out when readers can just as easily go online, see podcasts of the fashion shows and form their own opinions.
Women's magazines are, for the most part, playing catch-up rather than leading women like sheep. The ones that succeed do so by re-inventing the formula of a women's magazine: Lucky, for example, is indistinguishable from a catalog; InStyle is about crawling inside the closets and purses of Hollywood royalty; O is about the cult of personality and being Oprah's best friend. None of these magazines have dictatorial voices. If anyone is leading the pack, it's the goons in marketing research who are conducting focus groups to divine where the magazine ought to be ten years from now.
But that's more reality than this movie can handle. Afflicted with something resembling the Stockholm Syndrome, Andy sets out to be the best little go-fer in the whole world, which doesn't leave much time for a private life. Nigel the art director (Stanley Tucci) gives her a makeover and for the next third of the movie, Andy struts her stuff in finery pilfered from the closets of the magazine. For a movie that spends a lot of time fretting about business ethics and cutting corners on personal relationships, "Prada" has no problem accepting the practice of underpaid fashion magazine staffers appropriating swag that's actually the property of the magazine. Nor does it draw any connection between the monstrous salary that a Miranda Priestley draws and the abusive way she treats her underlings, or the propriety of treating magazine employees as personal servants who pick up her drycleaning.
In the oddest turn that the movie takes, Andy agonizes about hurting co-workers who have treated her abominably. That's supposed to be a sign of character rather than insanity. Andy is heartsick over going to Paris in place of Miranda's other assistant, Emily, who's a baby tyrant in training. When Andy learns that Miranda is likely to lose her job, she thinks only of Miranda's welfare and doesn't seem to realize that she's going to be on the street as well. She also passes up a chance to meet the editor of New York Magazine because it's her boyfriend's birthday--she's hours late for an intimate dinner with him, but can't spare an additional ten minutes for a meeting that could make her career. Ultimately, her way of resolving these conflicts is to throw her cellphone in the air--much like Mary Tyler Moore tossing her beret skyward--and leave to work in a "serious" environment--a small newspaper that's an amalgam of the Village Voice and the New York Observer. As if she won't find gargantuan egos and monstrous tyrants there.
Why has a movie with this many plot holes done more than a $100 million in box office receipts? Well, Streep is wonderful, the clothes are beautiful and Hathaway is charming. In the end, all this surface glitz seduces the audience just as it does Andy Sachs, but not without producing a gnawing feeling that we've been had. There's a place for a film about advancing your career without drawing blood or compromising your values until you no longer recognize yourself in the mirror. But "The Devil Wears Prada" need not have bothered. It exists merely to engage us on a visual level and indoctrinate another generation of young women on the glamour of a New York publishing career. Ironically, this is the very myth that the novel sought to explode.