The original The Devil Wears Prada movie was a massive hit in 2006, but it got its start three years earlier with the novel of the same name, a roman à clef by Lauren Weisberger, who’d worked for a time as an assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The movie helped cement Anne Hathaway as an A-list star. It had a fantastic angle: Hathaway’s Andrea is a bright Medill grad who longs for a career as a serious journalist, but ends up working for the legendary editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), at a Vogue-like magazine, a world where she’s out of place. The film was funny and biting, and it presented a glamorous New York milieu of high fashion. And while the film skewered this world to a degree, it also took fashion itself very seriously.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 represents a welcome return to this world, one that's slickly produced, with just the right amount of fan service for fans of the first film and fashion obsessives. Also, there are cameos of fashion industry figures and of almost everyone else who regularly appears in “Page Six.” The new film also has a lot to say about modern media, journalism, ethics, and whether billionaires can be trusted.
Director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna are back, as are all the major principals (Hathaway, Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci), who remain viable movie stars. In fact, the sequel returns just about every living cast member from the first movie, except the guy who played Vince on Entourage is no longer Hathaway’s boyfriend. A realtor, played by Australian actor Patrick Brammall, does the honors instead. As the film begins, Hathaway’s Andy has achieved her dream of becoming a serious, award-winning journalist, although at the moment she’s giving an acceptance speech, she gets a text that she and her whole staff are being fired.
She returns to the fashion magazine Runway, taking over as features editor. At the same time, in a nod to the franchise’s origins, she’s tempted with an offer from an agent (Rachel Bloom, who co-created the great Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with screenwriter McKenna) to write a tell-all book about the magazine. The magazine is still run by Miranda, along with long-suffering art director Nigel (Tucci). Miranda’s as mean as ever, and still fighting off threats to her throne; she’s also remarried, to a nice-guy classical musician played by Kenneth Branagh.
B.J. Novak is Jay, the owner of the Conde Nast-like parent company; might his name being “Jay,” as the scion of a magazine publishing company, be a shot at Jay Penske? And Justin Theroux and Lucy Liu play a divorcing billionaire couple whose resemblance to Jeff Bezos and Mackenzie Scott is surely intentional. Meanwhile, an alleged controversy involving a “stereotypical” Asian character isn’t much. She’s meant as a stand-in for Hathaway’s character in the first movie, as a high-achieving aspiring “real journalist” who’s out of place in her first job at a fashion magazine.
In the third act, the film begins to resemble Succession, with characters flying to private islands to meet with various billionaires about company takeovers. Which was one place where the movie lost me a bit—an elite journalist whose previous workplace just got decimated, I imagine, would be unlikely to trust a Jeff Bezos-type as the savior of her new company. There’s also a scene, involving a secret tape recording of a meeting, that raises further ethical questions.
But The Devil Wears Prada delivers what the audience came for: gorgeous clothes, cutting lines from Miranda, and Anne Hathaway’s charm.
It’s Anne Hathaway Week, as I saw her other new movie, Mother Mary, the following night. And really, it’s Anne Hathaway Year, as Mother Mary was preceded by trailers for Prada and two other films the actress is starring in this summer, The Odyssey and The End of Oak Street. I’m not sick of her yet. Mother Mary is the latest from director David Lowery (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight), and it’s one of those movies that’s stylistically very impressive, but I’m not sure there’s anything that interesting happening underneath it.
Hathaway stars as the titular Mother Mary, a famous pop star who performs in elaborate costumes reminiscent of the ones Lady Gaga wore. Plotting a comeback after a layoff of several years, after an on-stage accident that may have been a suicide attempt, Mother Mary visits the barn-like studio of her longtime costume designer (Michaela Coel), with whom she has a complex past relationship. Most of the first half of the film is a series of confrontations/therapy sessions featuring the two of them sparring and sorting out their long-buried resentments. But then it takes a supernatural turn, as a mysterious red cloth soon emerges as the symbol for their shared trauma.
I enjoyed seeing Hathaway and Coel sparring with each other, and the supporting cast—all-female, I gather—is strong. But there’s not much going on at the center.