In the juiciest speech in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Miranda Priestly, the frosty-haired, frosty-souled Runway magazine editrix played by Meryl Streep (in a performance that should have won her the Oscar), looks over Andy (Anne Hathaway), her dressed-down second assistant, and dresses her down all the more by explaining that Andy may think she has nothing to do with the fashion world, but she couldn’t be more wrong.
Using Andy’s lumpy cerulean blue sweater to illustrate the point, Miranda explains how fashion filters down into the world in a thousand ways no one realizes, and that we all obey its dictates. (The speech was parodied this week in the best “Saturday Night Live” promo I’ve ever seen, with the great James Austin Johnson playing Miranda; it’s astonishing that they didn’t save it for the show.) Miranda’s speech is Andy’s first big lesson, and it’s also the first sign that Miranda isn’t just a sadistic boss from hell, impossibly haughty and demanding, giving Andy seven tasks to do at once, mixing in personal errands, expecting her to know things as if she were reading Miranda’s mind. Miranda certainly is all that, but it’s because she has a vision — of fashion, of the larger world, of her rightful place in it.
The thing about that speech is that it’s directed at the audience as much as it is at Andy. “The Devil Wears Prada” was a luscious screwball office comedy that, its bitch-snap way, became an ideal hangout movie. But its secret weapon was how it invited us to know and love a fashion world that we, like Andy, may have started off thinking we had little or nothing to do with. By the end of the movie, when Miranda, in a car traveling through Paris, tells Andy, “Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us” (a line Streep insisted be changed from “Everybody wants to be me”), what she’s saying is that fashion, in its swirl of commerce and beauty, with its tastemakers who are slightly absurd in their grandeur, is actually a place of divine meaning. “The Devil Wears Prada” was a satire of the fashion world that wound up seducing us into seeing the soul of the fashion world.
“The Devil Wears Prada 2,” as everyone knows by now, is a very different movie from its predecessor. The original film teased and snapped, with Miranda almost never letting down her superior-to-thou hauteur; the wit was fast and furious. The new movie, by contrast, is set in a media world that’s melting down like the polar ice caps, and so the movie, by design, doesn’t sparkle with the same fizz. It’s almost a drama zhuzhed with jokes rather than a comedy with a bittersweet undertone.
As an unabashed fan of the new film, I actually think that was the right way to go — to look at the characters, 20 years later, from a noticeably different angle, and maybe a richer one. Miranda is still the scolding queen bee of Runway, but now she’s anxious and vulnerable, working overtime to keep herself on that pedestal. She can no longer say anything that flies into her head (lest it result in an HR violation), and there’s a luscious moment of comeuppance where she’s forced by company mandate to fly coach.
Some viewers, including friends of mine, have mourned the absence of the verbal-scalpel-wielding ice-princess dictator of the first film, and there’s a certain way that I agree with them. Where the filmmakers — director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna — could have had their poison tart and eaten it too is if they’d presented us with this newly humane, relatable, emotionally colored-in Miranda and still given her 25 more whip-cracking lines that sound like the kind of thing Jean Smart tosses off by the pound in “Hacks.” Some people are never funnier than when they’re in deep shit, and Miranda, trying to save her empire, seems a perfect candidate for that sort of biting-through-tears gallows humor.
But where “The Devil Wears Prada 2” takes a chance, aims for the unexpected, and hits a bull’s-eye that I think says much about where moviegoers are coming from today is the way that it asks the audience to identify with the faltering fortunes of Runway magazine in a media world that’s hanging on by its fingernails. At Oscar time, when there’s a movie up for awards that’s about moviemaking, like “The Artist” or “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the standard line is that it will have a leg up with Hollywood insiders, who love seeing movies about themselves. Maybe so, but I think a great many ordinary people also love seeing movies about Hollywood — a real place that’s a myth of aspiration and dreams.
And the same dynamic may now be true of media. While it’s certainly true that media people love seeing movies about themselves, I think a lot of media wags have misjudged how all of that comes across in “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” Many have labeled the movie “dire” and “pessimistic,” because it touches such a raw nerve among media professionals who are anxious about their own livelihoods. But “The Devil Wears Prada 2” isn’t a handwringing downer; it’s actually a fable of hope and dreams set in the real world. Where the first film hinged on the glory of fashion, the new one is about saving the beauty and value of what the magazine world has been.
In the current media landscape, does that make the film a fairy tale? Perhaps. Yet there’s a meaning to it, and a crucial question: How much do we, as a society, care about the ideals of “old media” — beauty and reporting and experience, indelible images and writing, not just information but truth — and about whether those ideals live or die? “The Devil Wears Prada 2” uses the increasingly threatened fortunes of Runway magazine, and of Miranda herself, as a conduit to answering that question. Runway may be a glossy fashion product, but it’s conceived and executed like a work of art. The movie asks: Are we okay with all of that going away?
Early on, when Andy, now the serious journalist she always aspired to be, gets downsized from a boutique publication called Vanguard, only to land a position as Runway’s new features editor, she’s assigned to do a damage-control story about a company linked to Runway that had used a sweatshop. She succeeds, but the point is made that her story generates almost no traffic. A lesser movie would have made the piece a click-bait triumph. This one doesn’t pretend that winning eyeballs in 2026 is any easier than it is.
Yet the rest of the film rebels against the impulse of journalism by algorithm, arguing that only the human factor, curated and supported, can make a magazine like Runway — or, by implication, any great magazine — what it is. That’s the film’s drama. It’s what Miranda now stands for, as does Stanley Tucci’s Nigel, who has become such a velvet droll bitch-sage that he’s now the scene-stealer of the franchise. But that’s where “The Devil Wears Prada 2” isn’t just a movie about fashion or media. At heart it’s a light romp, yet by the end there’s something touching and transporting about it, because what Miranda and her people are battling, whether it’s the slashed budgets or the tech bros who want to control everything or the apathy bred by an unending tsunami of second-rate content, is what the world around us is becoming. What they’re fighting for is a place where the human touch can still reign.
variety.com
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