The Devil Wears Prada is a disingenuous whore of a film, luring you in with mouthwatering festoons of Moschino, Dolce and Gaultier, only to send you packing, unfulfilled and chastened in Old Navy.
Last seen in Nudie's chic suffering her cowboy husband's disinterest in Brokeback Mountain, Anne Hathaway here unconvincingly plays dumbs as Andy, a wide-eyed and poorly dressed Northwestern grad/Manhattan émigré. Andy decides that a job at fashion magazine Runway would be the perfect entree to the rough-and-tumble world of hard-hitting journalism. Director David Frankel (Sex in the City) misses the rich ironies in this ambition.
Incredibly, the magazine's Cruella DeVille-like editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), hires her. Andy's duties include fetching coffee, answering phones and being the butt of endless variations on the observation that she's a "fat" size 6 in a size 0 world.
Predictably, the job stresses Andy's relationship with chef-manqué boyfriend, Nate (Adrian Grenier), even as one of Nate's friends notes how men are congratulated for sacrificing their private lives for their careers while women are frowned upon for doing the same. The film, meanwhile, dedicates itself to reinforcing the rightness of this situation.
As a crucial Paris fashion show approaches, Andy's nerves whittle her down to a pleasing size 4, while the challenge of kowtowing to Miranda has her dressing in a mascara-heavy, neo-Yardley-girl manner, which has the distracting side effect of rendering Hathaway's already sizable orbs comparable to those of pop-eyed, Sterile Cuckoo-era Liza Minnelli.
The reinvented Andy becomes the nemesis of Miranda's other longtime suffering, nervous-wreck, anorexic assistant, Emily (Emily Blunt), and later is wooed by literary writer Christian (Simon West), who's so metrosexual that even his eyebrows are highlighted. Christian doesn't actually say, "Blow me and I'll get you in The New Yorker," but for all the film's subtlety, he may as well.
Should Andy remain Miranda's pony girl? Christian's girl-toy? Return to Nate and toss the Agnes B? After an hour of Theodore Shapiro's belligerently peppy score and Aline Brosh McKenna's schematic, laugh-free, forced-frothy screenplay—based on Lauren Weisberger's ubiquitous chick-lit potboiler—you won't even want to know.
There are surprises in what Prada boldly reveals about the fashion world. For example, it's predominately run by crazy and/or hot chicks, with only minor assists from flamboyant, sexless males such as that essayed by Stanley Tucci as Runway's fashion director, who seems perpetually on the verge of snickering from one of the mag's better closets, "Don't ask, don't tell." Streep, as she did with her over-the-top turn as The Manchurian Candidate's psychotically incestuous power Mom, really seems to be grooving on her role's later-Joan Crawford-phase qualities. Unfortunately, her white-pompadoured queen bitch is given no lines worthy of her camp glower. And a later bit that shows her falling apart to reveal the softie within not only plays like the pandering, rote bull it is, but has the suggestion that all poor Miranda needs is a hug and a good man and she'll stop with all this Type A behavior.
Required by box-office edicts to witlessly pander to red-staters, Prada reassures its audience that, while beauty is nice, excellence admirable and glamor buzzy, they all lead to utter misery. Now that even Will & Grace's dumbed-down version of queer sensibilities is gone, where will we turn to for a decent bitch-fest? Not here.