So-so Hollywood fare, but 2 thumbs up for Streep and Tucci

Rating: 6/10 (18 October 2006)

If you can tolerate the silliness heaped within in the first half hour or so, this comedy/drama settles down after that and becomes quite watchable. And it is a fabulous vehicle for Meryl Streep, who will undoubtedly receive an Oscar nomination for her turn as the acerbic, tyrannical editor of the leading women's fashion magazine in America, an executive who scrupulously lives out Teddy Roosevelt's dictum to walk softly and carry a big stick.
The plot is simple enough. Andy Sachs, (Anne Hathaway), a freshly graduated journalism star at Northwestern, comes to the Big Apple to seek her fortune as a writer and lands a job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly (Ms. Streep), the Queen of Hearts in fashion journalism. Andy struggles to please the unsatisfiable Ms. Priestly, who seems to quietly relish every opportunity to break everybody's balls on the premises. In the process Andy loses the affections of her friends and lover. When she has passed all of Priestly's sadistic little tests and gained a promotion to top assistant, she finally is in a position to see her boss's foibles in a clear light, and we know in a flash that redemption lies just around the corner.
The silliness early on is twofold. First, Andy comes to work looking like a college freshman dorm rat, oblivious to proper dress and grooming standards for work at a fashion mag. Nuh, uh. Sorry. If she's as smart as touted, she would not be that clueless. Her subsequent instant makeover into glamour queen merely underscores the stupid conceit of her initial frumpiness. Second, when the call comes in that Queen Priestly is arriving early for work (the point at which we first meet her), everyone on the staff  and there are scores of people  frantically dashes about cleaning up the trashed mess of paper, coffee cups, and general disarray so all is pristine when the Queen arrives. Again. Nuh, uh. Never happen. If Priestly's demand for decorum is that fierce and exacting, the place would never suffer the entropy we witness for even a moment.
These conceits are old fashioned, ham-handed Hollywood stuff. Scenes you'd never see in a European treatment of the same story. Scenes that cheapen an otherwise decent movie. With Adrian Grenier as Andy's boyfriend and Stanley Tucci as Priestly's chief designer, the best thing I've seen him do since his role as Secondo in Big Night. Hope he gets a supporting Oscar nomination. (The English actress Emily Blunt is miscast here as the assistant Andy displacesBlunt acts well enough but lacks the glamour for this role.) My grades: 6.5 (low B) (Seen on 10/15/06)