Life for those in fawning, panicked thrall to Runway magazine über-editor Miranda Priestly (
Meryl Streep
) can be nasty, brutish and short – as wannabe journalist and couture ignoramus Andy (Anne ‘Perky!’ Hathaway) discovers upon fluking her way into the coveted post of Miranda’s second assistant. But can she put up with the job’s incessant, ridiculous demands without going native?
‘The Devil Wears Prada’ is based on Lauren Weisberger’s roman-à-clef about her spell at Vogue, a blinkered but scathing rejection of fashmagland transformed by
Aline Brosh McKenna
’s script into an aspirational Manhattanite fairy-tale about an ugly duckling who goes to the ball but learns there’s no place like home. It’s far from perfect – a romantic subplot featuring a smoothie writer and the contrived third-act jeopardy at Paris Fashion Week are both duff – but it’s often very funny, especially Streep’s Priestly. She combines stringent expectations with infuriating vagueness and disappointment at the perennial incompetence of those around her. Still, the whole thing is humbug, a giant ad for the industry it affects to critique; any notion that it would be otherwise went out the window when the director of ‘Sex and the City’ was given the gig. The dodgy cable-knit polymixes and reckless carb consumption that initially mark Andy out are madeover: street crossings become her catwalks and reaching a size four marks a triumph. Sure, she jacks it in to work for a community newspaper, but when you can wheel on Valentino to croon over the creation with which he’s just fabulised Streep-Priestly, few 12-year-old girls will be leaving the cinema sighing, ‘Yes! Let me at that rent-fixing scandal!’