Sympathy for the Devil

The Devil Wears Prada. 7/6/06.

I feel a little bad about reviewing this movie without having read the book (although there's a delightful excerpt here). In fact, I rather suspect that Meryl Streep has ruined the book for me. Because, you see, she was so completely fabulous in the movie, that I couldn't help but love her, or at least admire and sympathize with her. She was at times so bitchy and crazy that I had to laugh out loud, but she was also just a strong, kick-ass female character who knew what she wanted and she got it.

So here's my (clearly highly professional) review: I loved this movie. It was a movie about the professional relationship between two intelligent, hard-working women, which is something I'd personally like to see more of. Granted, there are some feminist issues (ie the women can't seem to both focus on their jobs and keep their boyfriends, but even that seems just as much a failure on the part of the men to live up to these high-powered women if you ask me), but in general, the film depicts two women deciding what they want out of their lives and careers and going for it. While Anne Hathaway did a great job as the hapless Andy Sachs, and she looked beautiful in an Audrey Hepburn inspired look at the end of the movie, I want to see her move on to bigger and better roles. This was not exactly the part I want her to play. This film was constructed in many ways to chastize and debase her before she can 'find herself' and grow up, and I can't wait to see her kicking ass on her own.

Anyway, I adore chick lit and chick flicks as a guitly pleasure, and this was an excellent example of the genre; both of the women seem fairly real and sympathetic and they learn to appreciate each other's strengths and goals. Even better, it wasn't all about some sappy emphasis on the girl getting the man. The boyfriend seemed more like a side plot than a real tension, through Adrian Grenier was a wonderfully rumpled contrast to Streep's sleekness. I love the fact that although Andy Sachs austensibly had to choose between her job and her personal life (symbolized by a boyfriend), the personal life seemed mostly like an uninteresting side plot (her friends were barely characters at all and fairly dull as well) and in the end, while everything seems happy, her job and her boy may still be mutually exclusive.

Though it was set in the fashion industry, making Andy's size six figure a running joke and her weight loss an unexamined victory, the film did a good job of balancing the portrayal of a harsh business with some implied analysis of why it was both important and problematic (ok, it might have been nice to see a little more of this - I wasn't convinced that the fashion industry shouldn't still be considered frivolous or the butt of jokes). The film may have taken shortcuts in moving the plot along in order to include more jokes, but in the end, I found it well-done, funny, and quite satisfying. It provided both the lush visuals of fashion and style and the cool reality of Streep as the infamous Miranda Priestly. Only she wasn't much of a devil.