The Devil Wears Prada 2
by Aline Brosh McKenna
I went to The Devil Wears Prada 2 hoping to get some feel-good nostalgia, but found the movie to be so disconnected from the present moment that I had a hard time investing in the conflict or characters. The acting is great, but the plot doesn’t stand the test of time.
Set 20 years after the original, the movie addresses the death of print journalism when award winning journalist Andy (Anne Hathaway) loses her job when the newspaper she works for folds. She’s hired to be the features editor of Runway to help give them credibility after they publish an inaccurate piece about a fast fashion brand.
Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is still the editor-in-chief, although she’s been somewhat defanged due to HR complaints. She has to hang up her own coat–the indignity! Nigel (Stanley Tucci) is still in his role as Miranda’s second in command, which (given the two decade time jump) is depressing in itself. You deserve more, Nigel.
Runway gets new ownership and is looking to be gutted and Miranda removed from her role. Andy has to help save the magazine to save her job and, problematically, Miranda’s position as an icon and industry leader.
A huge problem with the movie is that Miranda is still terrible and I do not care even remotely if she remains the boss of pretend Vogue. She’s out of touch and mean-spirited, and we know from the last movie (and this one) that she’s only Andy’s ally as long as it benefits her. Even if she loses her job she’s still super rich and can presumably still influence the world of fashion from wherever she winds up. Or, you know, retire. It doesn’t matter to me.
The other problem is that we’re living in a world that is so remarkably different from 2006 (when the first movie is set) that the stakes mean nothing to me. There’s a scene where the characters are at a dinner at Italian fashion week, seated under Davinci’s Last Supper, dressed in couture, and I almost said out loud “I do not care about any of these people.”
When the original movie premiered, chick-lit like Confessions of a Shopaholic and TV shows like Sex in the City were incredibly popular. Being a young woman in The Big City and scoring high fashion at a sample sale was very much in the zeitgeist. The idea of blowing an entire paycheck on a pair of luxury shoes was a funny quirk. This was before people had Go Fund Mes set up to pay for healthcare crises.
Since the movie’s release we’ve had The Great Recession, Brexit, the #MeToo movement, multiple mass shootings, Black Lives Matter, a pandemic, and an insurrection (and I bet I’m forgetting things). It cost me $86 to put gas in my car today, and the thought of spending a ton of money on a handbag feels like conspicuous consumption, not aspiration. I do not have time to worry about Miranda Priestly when healthcare and basic essentials are on the verge of being unobtainable by the middle class (if not already there). At one point Nigel jokes that he once styled Ruth Bader Ginsberg and I thought “Oh yeah, she died and so did our right to abortion.”
In the first movie we were told that if you were plucky and resilient and survived that first terrible boss, you could make it anywhere, girl! You were on your way up! Th sequel is a reminder that no matter how hard you work and what you overcome, things may not get better. There’s a reason that we’re getting new installments of The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth is releasing a new Divergent book.
Basically, this movie did not read the room at all.
I still like the original Devil Wears Prada and I still watch it as a comfort movie. I do this because it reminds me of when I was just starting out and the world felt full of promise. The second movie falls flat because it’s a reminder of all the times that promise didn’t materialize. The rich are richer (there’s a Jeff Bezos-esque character in the movie and the fact that he can buy literally anything is treated as a funny joke that comes across totally tone deaf) and the idea of drooling over luxury couture feels too far fetched in our current economy for the movie to be escapist.
