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Andy Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway, returns to Runway as features editor in The Devil Wears Prada 2, the follow-up to the beloved 2006 film.Macall Polay/Supplied
The Devil Wears Prada 2
Directed by David Frankel
Written by Aline Brosh McKenna
Starring Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci
Classification PG; 119 minutes
Opens in theatres May 1
Here’s the thing about a movie that’s slumber-party-play-on-repeat-universally-beloved: It becomes precious to people. Revisiting it 20 years later, however, that precious/valuable risks succumbing to precious/twee. The Devil Wears Prada 2 succumbs.
The Devil Wears Prada began in 2003 as a poison-pen roman-à-clef novel by Lauren Weisberger, a disgruntled former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour, a boss so frosty she was dubbed Nuclear Wintour. It offered a juicy, behind-the-scenes peek into the bitter-chocolate heart of one of the world’s most glamorous companies, Condé Nast Publications, in an early internet era when magazines were still revered lifestyle bibles thick with ads.
The 2006 movie adaptation – Wintour was called Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), Weisberger was Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Vogue was Runway and Condé Nast was Elias-Clarke – softened the book’s bite, but it knew exactly what it was: a pleasing coming-of-age story about an ambitious young woman who moves to New York to figure out who she is and what she wants. It’s about the shock of a straight-As girl realizing that work is not school – bosses don’t reward you for doing your job well, they expect you to, and colleagues are often rivals, as evinced by the sharp-tongued Emily (a star-making turn by Emily Blunt).
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The sequel reunites Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci with Emily Blunt.Macall Polay/Supplied
It also features some bracing speeches about the costs of striving, especially for a woman. “Let me know when your whole life goes up in smoke,” Runway’s fashion editor, Nigel (Stanley Tucci), tells Andrea. “That means it’s time for a promotion.” By the end, Andrea has found the line she doesn’t want to cross, and strides off – in very nice boots – to a job she can believe in.
The sequel, however, has zero idea what it’s about, other than reuniting Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Tucci to reprise their characters 20 years later, making gobs of money and filling the frame with callbacks to the first film – “florals for spring,” two near-identical turquoise belts, cafeteria soup, the fashion closet, the dangers of going upstairs at Miranda’s, “a million girls would kill for this job,” Nigel’s ginormous ring, plus a certain cerulean sweater repurposed as an artfully distressed vest.
It begins with Andrea winning a journalism award and losing her investigative newspaper job on the same night, while Miranda faces social-media wrath for inadvertently lauding a sweatshop. When Elias-Clarke’s CEO hires Andrea as Runway’s new features editor to conduct “a bracing mea culpa,” it could have been a comic opportunity to turn the tables: The former assistant has toughened up, the once-terrifying boss is losing her edge.
Instead, we get a meandering plot about whether Miranda will become head of global content (Wintour’s current job), or Elias-Clarke’s new owner will gut Runway, or maybe a tech bro (Justin Theroux) will buy it – I can’t really say. I’m not sure screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and director David Frankel, also reprising their roles from the first film, even know.
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They certainly can’t decide if Miranda is a villain or a co-conspirator, or if Andrea is a wily professional or a still-naive pleaser. I guess once your film’s marketing gauntlet includes both sponsoring a category on Jeopardy! – it was labelled Fashion, but it was really trivia from the film – and having Wintour and Hathaway co-present the Oscar for best costume design, any smidge of satire is fatally muddled.
When Streep – wearing the cerulean sweater – recently appeared on Stephen Colbert’s late-night talk show, she said the first film was made under the radar for a minimal budget, “but this one, honey, they spent the money.” I suppose money is the real subject of The Devil Wears Prada 2. The problem is, Brosh McKenna and Frankel don’t know whether it’s good or bad.
They have numerous characters lament that having too much money represents “everything that’s wrong with our society,” and the tech bro is presented as a jerk. But they also want to dazzle us with fabulous New York apartments, elaborately decorated hotel suites and staggeringly lavish parties, including one set in Milan’s Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie at the foot of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. They glide through enclaves of the super-rich – the tech bro’s Lake Como patio; Miranda’s Hamptons estate, where the guest list includes a number of media celebrities playing themselves – and make fun of people who fly coach.
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The Devil Wears Prada 2 does a disservice to Blunt’s character, a fan favourite from the original movie, writes Johanna Schneller.Macall Polay/Supplied
The numerous fashion montages include glimpses of several famous industry figures, but any faint resemblance to how magazines work has been scrubbed away. Why, if the Met Gala’s theme is Spring Florals, is no one wearing florals? Why would a magazine have a fashion show in Milan? And how has Nigel not been fired already for borrowing couture from the fashion closet? I worked at Condé Nast for six years – believe me, those clothes went swiftly back to the designers, not onto the backs of the staff.
There’s an undercooked theme in the film about betrayal – hence The Last Supper – but the most betrayed character is Blunt’s. A fan favourite, she’s treated inexplicably cruelly here. She’s left Runway to run Dior, where she delivers a jaw-droppingly terrible speech about how $3,000 purses “tell the world who you are.” Her wit has evaporated, she is frequently wet-eyed and it’s just … sad.
Everyone’s least favourite part of the first film was Andrea’s whiny boyfriend, but she gets an even more tepid relationship this time, with an Australian contractor who turns heritage buildings into luxury apartments while lamenting that corporate consolidations suck the soul out of things, gut them and repackage them. Ahem, TDWP2. By the end, the people being betrayed are the fans.
None of this will matter, I know. The original is too adored; audiences won’t be able to resist. But maybe after watching the final shot, which Frankel shamelessly steals from a far better film about women and ambition, they can go home and revisit that one: Working Girl.
Special to The Globe and Mail
