Silk purse from sow's ear

Rating: 8/10 (9 July 2006)

Lauren Weisberger's eponymous tome was a thinly-veiled memoir of her brief stint as personal assistant to ice queen Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour. It wasn't the style or the storytelling that made the book a six-month Times bestseller item. After about the fifth trip to Starbucks schlepping coffee back to the fashion maven on excruciating four-inch heels, Weisberger's writing begins to get on your nerves. You're fascinated that a young woman would put up with such torture to make it in magazines or that any fashion world boss-lady could be so spoiled and mean, but the narrative is clumsy and repetitive.
That the movie sparkles is due to several things. Well, why shouldn't it? This is the world of high fashion. The pressure, the waste, the arbitrariness, are breathtaking -- but so, you have to admit, are the beauty, the elegance, and the glamor of this world. Aline Brosh McKenna worked wonders with the book, paring it down and introducing more of a sense of progression in her screenplay. The director, "Entourage" and "Sex and the City" alumnus David Frankel, and his team have made excellent choices, starting by casting Meryl Streep as piranha Editor-in-Chief Miranda Priestly and Stanley Tucci as Nigel, her fashion editor.
It's hard to say if one would want to watch the movie without Streep -- certainly not as much; but who cares? Steely, cruel, elegant, icy, and just a tiny bit pathetic, she's a wicked delight and a huge welcome relief from such Streep frumpery as Madison County, The Hours, Lemony Snicket, or Prairie Home Companion. Who knew she had so much delightful meanness in her? This is Streep with a whole new edge. But Meryl is a great actress, so there's balance to the extreme. The brief scene near the end where she tells Andy (Anne Hathaway, the author's character, Andy Sachs) that her husband is divorcing her is a quiet marvel. For a few minutes we look into this opaque creature and discover a human being who's caring and hurt. Tucci's Nigel is similarly nuanced, not the tacky, camp creature of the book but again a subtle, modulated portrait of a gay man who's got a lot of class. And yet this is all comedy and grotesque, because the world of fashion and above all Miranda Priestly's end of it are so awesomely, absurdly over-the-top.
And it's a lark from scene one, because Andy walks in for her interview as an eager young journalist out of college, but one who's never even heard of this Miranda Priestly lady, and who doesn't really want to write for Runway (the Vogue stand-in). Andy has big eyes and a wide mouth and she's pretty and she's not fat but she's a fashion idiot. She doesn't know who designed the clothes she's wearing, and she soon wishes the people in the office didn't either. She gets looked over from top to toe every time she turns around, and none of them like what they see. But she gets the job because Miranda is sick of sycophants. Not that she doesn't expect and demand that Andy will obey her every whim, and right this instant now, and "that's all" (which is how her commands all end, not with a "please" or a "thank you").
Streep is effective because she is never, ever shrill. She speaks always in a calm, low, modulated voice. "I cannot understand what you find so difficult about the instructions I have given, which were perfectly clear." That kind of thing. It's like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, it's crazy and it's autocratic -- Miranda is the supreme ruler of her considerable domain -- but we know that Andy is doing this only for a year, for the experience and for the line on her CV; she's not trapped in this world. And there are tiny, tiny signs that Miranda is favorably impressed by Andy's performance, despite the absolute absence of thank-you's or words of praise.
What also makes the movie work well is that fashion is about the way things look, and this is a pretty film, much meaner than Funny Face but as visually appealing. Lauren Weisberger is free with names, but she never makes us quite see the svelte "clackers" who hover around, or the exaggerated, hugely expensive clothes -- above all she can't show us how Nigel and staff dress Andy up to be seen with her boss. In the movie the sleek transformation unfolds breathtakingly before our eyes.
Absent from the movie is most of the book's meanness and hatred and bad language and Andy's nightmare drunken roommate. A lot of the grouchiness is absorbed into personal assistant number one, Emily (the able Emily Blunt, Tamsin in the dreamy My Summer of Love), who also takes the bump from a car the roommate gets in the book, but emerges less scathed.
Andy's suffering ghetto schoolteacher boyfriend Nate becomes an aspiring sous-chef played by spaniel-eyed cutie Adrien Grenier of "Entourage" whose biggest problem is achieving a killer port wine reduction. Andy's a central character in the movie but not the narrator and we're not stuck inside her head. The movie still has a little posse of underdeveloped friends, though, including a black woman photographer who has a big show, whom we never quite understand or see the point of. Luckily, the focus is always chiefly on queen bee Miranda with her vague commands and clear threats, and Andy trying to keep up, never quite succeeding, but still surviving beyond anyone's wildest expectations, so that before the end when Miranda tells Andy in the limo in Paris during the big fashion week, "You remind me of myself when I was your age," we're startled but not entirely surprised. This is the paradox that sustains the story: Andy hates Miranda, but she wants to please her. She hates this world, but it dazzles her. We leave the movie with somewhat the same feeling.