A brilliantly conceived work of art disguised as a light summer flick

Rating: 10/10 (3 July 2006)

The genius of this movie is that there are two distinctly different ways to view its storyline and moral.
The first is to see it as an example of how easy it is for people to lose their integrity when they land in a bad environment, and how wrong it is for bosses to treat their employees poorly. In this version of the story, Andy (the Anne Hathaway character) reluctantly takes a job as assistant to the editor of a prominent fashion magazine even though she wants to be a serious journalist. As time goes on, she forgets what is important in life--for example, she misses her boyfriend's birthday party because she has to work late, puts up with the unreasonable demands of her tyrannical boss at any hour of day or night, starts to enjoy the shallow pursuit of dressing well, loses her sense of humor, betrays her boyfriend by flirting with an attractive writer at a party, and agrees to her boss's request that she replace her co-assistant on a trip to Paris even though her colleague has been dreaming of the trip for months. The magazine editor (Meryl Streep) in this version is a cold, self-absorbed and calculating boss-from-hell who enjoys tormenting the people who work for her and cares only about outer beauty. In the end of this story, Andy regains her principles, summons up the courage to quit her horrid job at the meaningless fashion magazine, goes to work for a newspaper where she can make a difference in the world, gives away her couture outfits and goes back to not paying an overly large amount of attention to how she looks, and demonstrates in various ways that she once again cares about other people.
In the other story, the Meryl Streep character is an extremely talented fashion editor who is under tremendous pressure to make her magazine successful artistically and commercially. She is obsessive about her work because she cares about it and because she knows that she must do it extremely well in order to keep her position. She feels that her work is meaningful because it holds up an entire economic industry that includes mainstream as well as couture clothing and because (since fashion is fun when it's done well) it helps people of all sorts to enjoy life more. She believes that no one can do her job as well as she can, and she probably is right. She puts a huge amount of time into her job (losing two husbands and missing out on important times with her daughters as a result), and demands that the people who work for her show at least a fraction of her own dedication to their jobs as well as help to make her life a little easier. Because she is perfectionistic and under time pressure, she expects the people around her to be ultra- competent at all times and throws out chilly little comments when she feels her employees are not doing a good job or (especially) wasting her extremely precious time. She knows how business works as well as how to use her power in order to get what she needs in order to create a high-quality magazine and (in a cut-throat business) keep her job. At one point she hurts her most valued employee in order to keep herself from being fired, but (since she is shown helping people she thinks are talented even when it is not to her own benefit) it seems likely that she will help him to obtain other opportunities in the future. She is aware that the people who work for her are scared to death of her and that her general reputation is that of an icy terror, but she can't figure out how to do her job well plus have people like her. She also fails at all attempts to explain to other people why she acts as she does. After Andy (whom she thinks of as her protégé) quits, she is disappointed that the promising young woman decided to opt out of a career in the fashion business. Nonetheless, she is impressed and pleased that Andy is successfully seeking out her own chosen path in life, and helps her to do so by giving her a stellar letter of recommendation. In this reading of the story, the magazine editor is a tragic character of classic dimensions, in that she is not able to sustain relationships or obtain understanding from people around her while exercising her substantial professional and creative gifts.
Which reading of the movie is "correct"? The one you choose probably has a lot to do with your life experiences and the way in which you see the world. Either could be right.
Only really great texts can be read in such totally disparate ways and argued forever with no firm conclusion ever reached. The fact that this characteristic is buried in what seems on the surface to be merely a light (and very funny) mainstream summer comedy makes its presence even more impressive.
As a side note, the original novel presented only the first reading (at least unless one looks extremely intently between the lines). The people responsible for adding the second reading (Meryl Streep, the screenwriter, the director, whoever) deserve more than Oscars. A brilliant work all around.