Faster than the speedily clearing racks at a sample sale; more powerful than the whims of a loco trendsetter; and able to leap midtown commuters in a single Manolo-heeled bound… All right, maybe the only thing super about this commonplace, boss-from-hell comedy is its couture and fluffiness, but at least it flies at a quicker clip than the Kryptonian überman's insipid return this week. Are capes in this season?
As adapted from Lauren Weisberger's chick-lit best-seller, the thinly veiled roman à clef concerning her tenure as abused personal assistant to Vogue's notoriously difficult editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, The Devil Wears Prada is a fashion-mag procedural that thinks itself a cautionary tale. Condensed but hardly repurposed from the novel, the film tells the story of recent college grad Andy Sachs (The Princess Diaries' doe-eyed Anne Hathaway), a wannabe Manhattan journo who lucks into a gig as the errand-running slave to Runway magazine's diva honcho Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep, so stupendously funny at times that she nearly salvages the whole thing). Figuring a year in an insufferable job will potentially help her career later, the drably out-of-place Andy's existence in the Elias-Clark building (ahem, Condé Nast) is a daily montage of ice-water shocks over the brutal superficiality that insulates the fashion-world bubble.
While newbies to this haute culture might see the madness as caricature, like Funny Face updated with a million-dollar clothing budget (Sex and the City costumer Patricia Field deserves the best, no?), the bitchy behavior is both the carnival's main attraction and a devastatingly accurate portrayal to regular readers of Gawker.com: Watch the sitcom yuks fly as fashionistas roll their eyes at Andy, belittling her un-chic-ness to her face! Hear boss Miranda's scathingly singsong dictum of "that's all" as she bullies Andy to stressful new depths of degradation with insanely unreasonable demands! See Andy's sudden makeover and transformation into acceptance by a clique who still secretly hates everybody, maybe even themselves!
Now let's drop the fiction and call a Kate Spade a spade; this real-world precision is what makes the single repeated joke of The Devil Wears Prada as grossly anti-feminist as the fashion biz itself, perpetuating the myth that women sizes 6 and over are fat, ugly, and worthless. When Miranda tells her once fresh-faced, now jaded protégé, "Don't be ridiculous, everyone wants to be us," we can predict whether Andy will quit or continue to roll with the manicured punches, but the choice offers no qualifier beyond a personal preference. It's as if screwing over people to climb a societal ladder (and maintaining that inner beauty better look fabulous on the outside) has no less integrity than following one's dreams elsewhere. For every girl who has ever wanted to raid the beauty closet, here's a high-gloss fantasy fable that tastes like sweet chocolate to a bulimic.
—Aaron Hillis
