by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday afternoon my husband Charles and I watched the 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada, about a fictional fashion magazine named Runway and its imperious, narcissistic, almost fascist editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep, in what might be the most openly ful-thrated villainess she’s ever played; when she played Margaret Thatcier in Teh Iron Lady her friends were shocked that she’d take on a role of a person whose real-life politics were the opposite of her own, but she said she admired Thatcher for her integrity and that came through in the way she played her). The plot deals with Andha “Andy” Sa\chs (Anne Hathaway), a young journalism student who edited the student paper at Northwestern University and has come to New York to break into the magazine business. Unfortunately, the only job she’s able to land is as second assistant to the fearsome Miranda Priestly at Runway, and her direct supervisor, the first assistant, is Emily (Emily Blunt), an impossibly thin Englishwoman who’s bought into the whole cult of fashion, while Andy couldn’t care less about it and takes the job at
Runwayonly because people have told her that if she can survive a year working for Miranda Priestly she cna get a job anywhere in the business after that. Emily had been the second assistant until she got promoted after the first assistant left (it’s unclear why, though I’m assuming it was to get married and retire), and Miranda is so uninterested in Andy that for the first few days Andy works at Runway, Miranda calls her “Emily.” (This reminded me of the famous story about Sam Goldwyn, who likewise couldn’t have cared less about getting his employees’ names right; he called producer Arthur Hornbolw “Hornbloom,” and when Hornblow got so disgusted he wrote his name on a piece of paper in big letters to show to Goldwyn, Goldwyn waved it aside and said, “Show me later, Mr. Hornbloom.”)
The film was based on a novel by Lauren wEisberger, also called The Devil Wears Prada, and it was widely understood to be a thinly veiled portrait of a real person, Vogue editor Anna Wintou. (The screenplay was by Aline Brosh McKenzie and the director was David Franklin, so once again a movie about women and their power was directed by a man.) Andy’s non-fit in the fashion world is shown not only by her use of a male name (though even when Miranda stops calling her “Emily,” she insists on addressing her as “Andrea”) but by the way she dresses herself. Neither Charles noir I saw anything wrong with her wardrobe, but Andy is constantly the butt of jokes around the office because she’s dressed in comfortable but not stylish clothes and Miranda’s assistant NIgel (Stanley Tucci, fourth-billed and the first male in the cast list) one day waves a pair of stiletto high heels and makes it clear they expect her to wear them. Just how they expect her to do a job that requires so much running around to keep up with Miranda’s frantic demands in preposterous shoes like that is a mystery to me, but then again my whole attitude towards clothes has always been that as long as they fit, keep me warm and cover up all the parts the law says I have to, I really don’t care what they look like. In one scene she decides to take the plunge, and with Nigel’s help she helps herself to some of the free samples Runway gets from designers eager for the magazine to write up their stuff, and dresses stylishly at long last while the soundtrack blares out Madonna’s mega-hit “Vogue.” (I loved the irony of this film using a song with the same name as the real-life magazine the fictitious Runway is obviously based on.)
It took me a while to realize it, but there are more reasons the film is called The Devil Wears Prada than just the sheer imperiousness of Meryl Streep’s character: it’s actually a modern-dress version of the Faust legend, with Andy as Faust and Miranda as Mephistopheles tempting her to the dark side of the fashionista world, while her live-in boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier, a nice-looking young man who should have had a bigger career than he did; since then he’s done mostly work in TV movies and mini-series, including one for Netflix called Clickbait), a baker at a local New York bistro, tries to keep her honest and above-board. The film’s climax takes place at the Paris fashion week, which Miranda takes Andy to even though Emily has been yearhing to go for years (at least partly to get the free clothes offered by the various designers), until Miranda decides to take Andy instead and Andyt calls Emily on her cell phone. Emily makes the mistake of taking the call while crossing a street, gets run over and ends up in the hospital with casts on both legs while Andy goes to the fashion week – and there’s a marvelously funny scene of the scarves Emily was bringing back to the Runway office flying through the air as she is struck, and the passers’by frantically grabbing for them. While there, Andy ends up in bed with Christiian Thompson (Simon Baker), a free-lance journalist and wit who’s been after Andy since they met at an earlier Runway party and who seems to hold the keys to the kingdom of serous magazine writing for which Andy yearns. (I wondered if the character was based on Gore Vidal.) Unfortunately, the next morning Andy realizes that Christian is part of a plot with the publisher of Runway and a younger editor, Jacqueline Follet (Stephanie Szostak), to take over Runway and ace Miranda out of it.
Since we’ve already seen Miranda’s second husband divorce her (her main concern is the welfare of her twin daughters by her first husband, for whom Miranda demanded a pre-publication copy of the latest Harry Potter novel – which Andy obtained with Christian’s help – and their loss of yet another father-figure), it seemed for a brief bit that the writers were going to turn Miranda into a figure of pathos. But no-o-o-o-o, after a series of efforts on Andy’s part to warn Miranda of the impending coup against her, it turns out Miranda knew about it all along and had forestalled it by getting Jacqueline the big job as partner to fashion designer James Holt (Daniel Sunjata) that Nigel had been hoping for. Andy is so disgusted that the next time Miranda calls her with one of her usual peremptory demands, Andy throws her cell phone into the nearest Paris fountain and eventually lands the job she’d always wanted – an editorial position at New York magazine – while Nate gets a job as sous-chef at a restaurant in Boston (so after what looked like a reconciliation, they end up in different cities). Charles quite liked The Devil Wears Prada and was particularly impressed at its unpredictability: throughout the story we’re kept in suspense as to whether Andy is going to get subsumed into the world of fashion or resist it and leave her job with her head held high. I was a bit put out by the sheer number of commercials Lifetime put into it to stretch a 109-minute movie into a three-hour time slot – though it also occurred to me that the interruptions may have helped make the movie more watchable in that one hour and 49 minutes of continuous bitchery from Meryl Streep in the most unlovable role of her illustrious career might have got more than a bit wearing after a while!
