David Frankel (2006)
I saw it on its original release. The main difference, two-and-a-half years later, was a consequence of Anne Hathaway’s performance in Rachel Getting Married. Because that proved what she’s capable of, I found myself seeing more substance now than in 2006 (or than there might actually be) in her portrait of Andrea (Andy) Sachs – a recent university graduate and would-be journalist, who gets a job as junior PA to Miranda Priestly, the legendary, fearfully admired editor of ‘Runway’, a New York fashion magazine. Andy’s appointment comes as a surprise to her and everyone else: she doesn’t take pains with her appearance and doesn’t know the first thing about the world of fashion. Miranda explains to Andy her disappointment with a succession of eager, soigné incompetents –‘So I thought, hire the fat, smart girl’. Since she’s lovely from the start, the fact that Anne Hathaway is supposed to be a klutzy plain Jane amounts to the film’s best joke about fashionista standards – although it’s true she looks even more spectacular once she’s been persuaded to dress for the job.
The ice queen/dragon lady/boss from hell is allegedly based on Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue. Miranda Priestly is a pretty good name for the character (in contrast to ‘Runway’ – a weak, unfunny title for the magazine). At the time Prada was released (and since), Meryl Streep has lamented the dearth of good parts for film actresses of her age. (She’s exactly the same age as Wintour – 57 when she made the film. That’s about the age she looks too – so that Miranda’s twin daughters seem improbably young, even allowing that their mother would have concentrated for longer than usual on making a career rather than a family.) In theory, it’s a pity that Streep’s skills aren’t being put at the service of something more stretching; in fact, her complete, relaxed confidence as Miranda is very satisfying and makes this one of her most enjoyable performances. You can sense – and share – Streep’s pleasure in what her vocal and gestural repertoire allows her to do here. Miranda, in the act of dismissing someone and about to signal this manually, decides at the last moment to do something else with her hand – as if even the smallest physical effort isn’t worth wasting on the person being dismissed. She hardly ever raises her voice: she doesn’t need to, she’s utterly in charge. Miranda occasionally uses phrases to suggest bewildered helplessness (‘I just don’t understand … can someone please help me?’): she’s being sarcastic – but there’s also a hint of vulnerability in Streep’s tone, which comes to make sense as the plot unrolls. When Andy delivers proofs of the magazine to Miranda’s home, she inadvertently departs from the prescribed route in and out and interrupts a tense conversation between Miranda and the husband who’s about to divorce her: Streep’s incredulity at this world-shattering invasion of territory has a charge – Miranda, in this moment, really is helpless. And I bet Meryl Streep liked the one scene in which we see Miranda wearing no make-up as much as all the power-dressed ones put together.
It’s not a surprise (or necessarily a problem) that the filmmakers bite the hand that feeds them – confirming the audience’s preconceptions of the fashion universe, letting us enjoy its brittle, bitchy allure but having a heroine who then emerges as superior to it. Besides, Miranda and her loyal art director Nigel are both given opportunities to explain the power of fashion and Streep and Stanley Tucci deliver these messages with wit and integrity, making them funny and convincing you that the characters mean what they say. For Nigel, secretly looking at fashion magazines in his bedroom as a boy was an escape from the life dictated by his jock brothers (in the way literature has often been for children in a family that never had a book in the house). Miranda scorns – with freezing passion – Andy’s delusion that she’s not part of the fashion world, explaining how her thoughtless choice of a ‘cerulean’-coloured sweater has actually been dictated by a chain of events within that world. But it becomes too obvious that Andy is going to see through and rise above the self-serving, self-defeating rivalries and power games she encounters in and around ‘Runway’: as a result, the film is going through the motions in its last half hour. In this respect, it’s very different from – and thinner than – Working Girl, where the heroine’s dual determinations to get her man and the job she knows she deserves in big business converge irresistibly. (It’s also a presumably unintentional joke that Andy’s higher professional calling is to journalism.)
The Devil Wears Prada – adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna from a novel by Lauren Weisberger – isn’t much of a picture and, apart from Streep, Hathaway and Tucci, the performers aren’t as entertaining as you might hope. Emily Blunt, as Miranda’s senior PA Emily, gives the impression that she’s auditioning for a bigger career in pictures: it has proved to be a successful audition but Blunt makes Emily too desperately bossy and obviously insecure – she’s clearly a loser from the outset so that her demotion has very little impact: you just feel mildly sorry for her. The men in Andy’s life are very dull. As a hot-property magazine writer who seduces her, Simon Baker gives a smiley-vulpine, one-note performance. Andy’s warm-hearted, gentle boyfriend (Adrian Grenier), a chef, is innocuous. Rich Sommer (from Mad Men) plays Andy’s best girlfriend’s boyfriend; he at least suggests brains enough to challenge Andy about going native on planet ‘Runway’. (Andy’s fealty to Miranda seems to materialise, and be set in stone, in the course of a dinner with her father (David Marshall Grant), who’s evidently disappointed that his highly educated daughter is, as he sees it, wasting her time in an innately frivolous occupation.) The director David Frankel does an adequate job of keeping the action lively, even if his means of doing so are largely uninspired – weakly satirical montages, an unsurprising (though enjoyable) pop soundtrack.
13 June 2009
