Saw it last night, in a theatre with the highest giggling-blond-girl:seat ratio I've ever encountered. The film itself is a lot of fun. Meryl Streep turns in a killer performance, with everything from her imperious body language to her voice tonality totally restructuring itself to fit the character. There's just a world of difference between good-looking young folks who can read lines and genuine professionals who approach this as an art. Saw it last night, in a theatre with the highest giggling-blond-girl:seat ratio I've ever encountered. The film itself is a lot of fun. Meryl Streep turns in a killer performance, with everything from her imperious body language to her voice tonality totally restructuring itself to fit the character. There's just a world of difference between good-looking young folks who can read lines and genuine professionals who approach this as an art.
The movie, as you've probably heard, suffers a bit by constantly underscoring how unattractive and fat Anne Hathaway is -- it's sort of a "who ya gonna believe? Our script or your lying eyes?' situation. But that's not actually different in this flick than others, and at least her boyfriend is similarly model-quality to compensate, so it doesn't detract too much.
The story really revolves around the insubstantiality of the job, not the Prada-wearing devil. The tension wasn't in Streep's character, but in the level of pressure and urgency emanating from what should be a stupid job. Fashion, after all, is dumb -- and it's presented as so throughout the film. The people in it are catty and shallow, the events silly and overdone, the lifestyle consuming and empt. So to transform the assistant's job at such an insubstantial magazine into a position with the pressure of, say, your first year out of law school, or your residency, is a high crime indeed.
Nevertheless, it's a bit odd to see a film about this demonic workload when nothing occurs that would be worthy of remark a Manhattan law firm, or an ER. Anyone who's watched an episode of Scrubs has seen young, attractive people working 14-hour days and letting a Blackberry run their life. But in that show, the payoff -- medicine, helping people, common good, etc -- renders the travails less significant, and certainly fair. In The Devil Wears Prada, however, there's no social good balancing the other end of the scale, so the job, despite being a powerful door opener, is presented as utterly irredeemable, its superficiality compounded by the seriousness with which it's treated.
So the dissonance there was troubling, but since I'm one who thinks fashion stupid, I wasn't too bothered. As a good labor-liberal and thus an opponent of insane, mandated workloads in most all their forms, I'm troubled by such workloads wherever they appear. That goes for medical residencies, associate positions, and Anna Wintour assistants. These folks need to unionize. Grunts of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
