There are movies out there that I refer to as “[name of ex-wife] Movies.” These are movies that my ex-wife would leave on if she was flipping channels on the TV. These are movies where I also only generally saw maybe 3/4 of the movie, never the beginning, and rarely the end. And due to the nature of cable TV, I saw the same 3/4 of these movies over and over again. Some of these movies are quite good, but because I saw the same 3/4 over and over, when I do sit down to watch the rest, I don’t have much interest to do so. I don’t generally like revisiting movies these days without a good reason, so I can’t bring myself to see the rest of these movies more often than not. That said, The Devil Wears Prada was one of the rare ones where I got to see the whole thing. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand or really have much interest in the world of high fashion, but there is a nice charm to that movie.
Granted, I also thought Anne Hathaway’s Andy looked better before she started dressing fashionably, but that’s me. Anyway, there’s a sequel out now, and it is apparently a bit of a hit.
Andy Sachs (Hathaway) is receiving a prestigious journalism award when she gets word that she and all her present colleagues have just lost their jobs, as told to them through a text message. At the same time, Miranda Priestly’s (Meryl Streep) magazine Runway is hit with a massive scandal where the magazine endorsed a company’s line without looking into how the company produced it. At the suggestion of the publishing company’s billionaire owner, Andy is hired by Runway to be the new feature’s editor, and while Miranda isn’t happy to see her–to be fair, Miranda isn’t happy to see anybody and she mostly seems to have forgotten her–there’s still Miranda’s longtime assistant Nigel (Stanley Tucci), and he’s always glad to see Andy. But with issues involving cleaning up the magazine’s image, now more of an online publication where likes and comments and views are what matters, Andy isn’t getting very far right away.
But Andy is nothing is not persistent, and while she toys with writing a book about Miranda, the real problem rears its head late in the movie. To be fair, the shift doesn’t come out of nowhere. The movie isn’t about cutthroat world of fashion publishing. No, instead it’s about how things are changing in ways that aren’t working out too much for people, as best embodied in a scene where Andy sees former co-worker Emily (Emily Blunt), now a high-ranking executive at Dior, where she says that she moved from publishing to vending because that was the only part of the fashion industry that was still profitable. Yes, the movie is really more about the death of publishing. Can these characters pull off a victory in a world where idiot billionaires think AI can replace people in the world of fashion, art, and everything else that makes life interesting?
I was charmed here. It’s not the same story as before, even if it is many of the same characters. It’s 20 years later, and even if Andy is older and more accomplished, she still wants some acknowledgement from her boss. Hathaway is charming, Blunt has the right amount of sass, and I actually wanted to get a hug from Stanley Tucci is over, all in a movie that is essentially about the perils of late=stage capitalism.
But then there’s Streep, and I am hesitant to call a living person an icon for a wide range of reasons, but at a certain point, it occurred to me that I was watching Streep play a character that is, in-universe, an icon. Miranda Priestly is the master of the withering put-down, a woman who has lived by her fashion instincts for years, and while she may not remember her old assistants right away, every so often, she’ll drop a warm line or acknowledge that she knows exactly who people perceive her to be, in part because she fully acknowledges being that person. Miranda lives in a world where she is a larger-than-life person, and the movie and Streep’s performance reflect that. Does that mean we need a third installment in this series? Well, no, but I was pleasantly surprised by the second one, so who knows?
Grade: B+
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