Sometimes you don’t realise a movie is beloved until they make a sequel to it. Sure, they make sequels to movies that aren’t beloved, but that’s not a problem for The Devil Wears Prada, which has planted more flags in the zeitgeist than you might think. It gave an iconic role to the already iconic Meryl Streep. It introduced us to one of the brightest talents of the last 20 years, Emily Blunt. And it was the film that made Anne Hathaway a star. In Hollywood terms, that’s plenty beloved.
The result is a sequel that will be beloved by no one. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is dull as dishwater, which is a really hard feat to pull off when it is puts its characters in and out of all manner of couture outfits, and even features a number by Lady Gaga.
What makes it so dull is that it is a prolonged and needlessly complicated story of the potential changing of hands of the editorial positions at an august fashion magazine, not to mention the potential changing of ownership of the larger media company that publishes it. That might be what you think a Devil Wears Prada movie should be about, but it is about it in such a lifeless way, lacking in moments of conspicuous cleverness or astuteness. What’s worse is that it makes only flimsy gestures toward recognising how unimportant a fashion magazine is in the grand scheme of the current world climate. The Devil Wears Prada 2 isn’t counterprogramming. It feels disconnected from the moment.
Andrea Sachs (Hathaway) has had her eye on higher minded things in the 20 years since she was Miranda Priestly’s assistant at Runway, a thinly veiled version of the real magazine Vogue, just as Priestly (Streep) is a thinly veiled version of former Vogue editor-in-chief and fashion kingmaker Anna Wintour. Priestly is even going for the very promotion that the real Anna Wintour currently holds, global chief content officer for the larger media company. But let’s not get sidetracked. We were talking about Andy.
She’s been a mainstream journalist lo these 20 years, and a pretty successful one, as one of her long-form pieces has just been recipient of a prestigious journalism award. In the interest of screenplay economy – which the movie rarely shows in a full two hours of runtime – she and her colleagues at the awards banquet table receive a group text just as she’s receiving the award, saying that their venerable publication is being consolidated and that they’ve all been sacked.
As luck would have it, Runway has also fallen on hard times in the wake of a scandal where the magazine did not thoroughly vet a company that used sweat shops to make the fast fashion the magazine endorsed. So the ageing owner of the parent company hires Andy as the magazine’s new features editor, a decision that was not run by Miranda nor her loyal right hand man Nigel (Stanley Tucci), also returning from the first movie. Miranda’s a bit ticked off she can no longer look down her nose at the woman she once threw her coats at, but she’s got bigger things in mind due to her pending promotion, which she may need Andy’s help to secure in the form of a well-written mea culpa. Among their apology tour is kissing up to one of their biggest advertisers, Christian Dior, which has another of Miranda’s former assistants, Emily (Blunt), in a key decision-making position.
At his own 75th birthday, her boss keels over, leaving his douchebag son (B.J. Novak) in charge, and leaving quite a bit of doubt as to whether the company’s new head has any intention of honouring his father’s wishes. Thus begins a series of schemes to try to land everyone their dream jobs and save the magazine from the same fate that sunk Andy’s former employer in a rapidly changing media industry.
The Devil Wears Prada’s primary calling card was its cattiness, which created an elevated sense of wickedness and an air of general intelligence and humour in the writing. The Devil Wears Prada 2 recognises the desirability of having a similar sense of humour, but hasn’t the materials to accomplish it in Aline Brosh McKenna’s script. This is supposed to be the sort of movie that gaggles of women watch together after a couple bellinis, but there’s nothing in the content here to encourage that sort of convivial atmosphere. It all just feels flat, overly diagrammed and lacking in spunk. There’s nothing worse than being a little tipsy and watching something that’s putting you to sleep.
Returning director David Frankel‘s movie tries to fill in its notable gaps with funny faces, including Aussie Patrick Brammall as a love interest for Andy (even though she professes she doesn’t need one) and Justin Theroux playing a billionaire who’s in such constant and frivolous good spirts that it’s like he’s on laughing gas. He needed to share it with the audience because that shit is not contagious. There’s also a small role for Lucy Liu here, and an even smaller role for Kenneth Branagh. We needed a bigger splash in terms of new cast members, and one scene from Lady Gaga wasn’t it.
This is a professional screenplay, so of course it understands where we’re supposed to get the feels, and how each “monstrous” character should be revealed as an old softie at just the right juncture of the narrative. All this falls equally on deaf ears. We see the wheels turning but we don’t feel the momentum. And if we still wore watches like we did when the first movie came out in 2006, we’d be checking them every two minutes to see how much closer we are to the estimated end time.
Because we are dealing with a film that cares a lot about the superficial – both the characters in the story and, it would seem, the people making the film – it’s probably worth meeting them on their level and saying that everyone in this film is remarkably well preserved. It isn’t easy to tell that even five years have passed since The Devil Wears Prada, let alone 20, given how good everyone looks. Streep herself is 76, Anna Wintour’s exact age, yet the approach of her 80th birthday has done nothing to dim her glow.
Maybe what those 20 years really mean for the central four actors is that they sort of have to do this movie now, even though they might have all been perfectly satisfied closing the Devil Wears Prada chapter of their lives. Put nearly anyone 20 years further into their career in Hollywood, and they’ve seen their choices diminish – particularly women. That this film has these three strong women, but doesn’t do much that feels like a positive feminist gesture, indicates just how retrograde this feels, how stuck in a time when magazines actually did still dominate the landscape.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened yesterday in cinemas.