In The Devil Wears Prada 2, Class Struggle Meets the Red Carpet

The early scenes of The Devil Wears Prada 2 appear to have been designed in a lab to make critics and journalists break out in stress hives. You could hear the shudders of recognition at my press screening as we watched Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) learn that she and all her colleagues at the New York Vanguard newspaper had been fired right as they were receiving awards for their journalism. The ominous buzzing of phones, the commingling of accomplishment and humiliation, the sudden pathos of cheap glass awards, the rage at their now-former CEO’s $11 million paycheck… David Frankel’s film knew exactly which buttons to push in our particular audience.

This sequel to the 2006 hit comedy, which depicted the naïve young Andy’s trial by fire at the hands of the icily cruel fashion mag editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable dissonances between its vision of journalistic integrity and its decadent fascination with glamor and couture. For the film’s first hour, that’s Andy’s central dilemma: Newly unemployed, she’s asked by Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) the billionaire owner of Elias-Clarke publishing, to cast most of her principles aside and come back to Miranda’s Runway magazine as a features editor, in an effort to quell a sudden social media firestorm caused by an ill-advised puff piece about a shady fast-fashion company.

This remains a great part for Hathaway, who can hint at all sorts of neuroses beneath a character’s surface pep. The first film, arriving a few years after the actress’s teenage breakthrough in The Princess Diaries (2001), proved that she was a star. Now, after years of acclaim and awards and a wide array of roles (she’s in five movies this year alone), she reconnects to Andy’s pluck and striving. Determined to use her new position to elevate the journalism at the now-struggling Runway, Andy attempts to write and edit serious pieces, even as Miranda, who didn’t want to hire her and claims not to remember her, actively ignores her. How will our intrepid heroine, who still lives in a cluttered apartment with brown water gurgling out of her tap, fit back into this world of click-clacking stilettoes and sneering sylphs, all while somehow preserving her soul?

It’s a tension the film entertainingly works for as long as it can. Everywhere Andy turns, she’s faced with the runaway indulgences of wealth and power and all their attendant cruelties. She even begins to romance Peter (Patrick Brammall), an Aussie “contractor” who pools together rich buyers to then convert old New York buildings into elegant condos. But as much as the picture might coddle our stirrings of class solidarity, to expect a movie like this — a bouncy, frothy comedy with red carpet montages and cameos from people like Donatella Versace and Marc Jacobs — to reconcile this discrepancy between economic inequality and fashionista striving would be, frankly, psychotic. This is the kind of film in which we’re supposed to chuckle knowingly at a putdown like “Retail suits you,” uttered by Runway fashion director Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) towards Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), once Miranda’s loyal assistant, now a Dior executive. The idea of snobbery as an expression of virtue sounds utterly ludicrous, and yet, don’t we all abide by it, all the time? And as much as we might demonize the wealthy and powerful, don’t many of us secretly (and sometimes not-so-secretly) hope that they will be our salvation? As such, maybe this frivolous little movie reflects our own world back to us in more ways than we might wish to admit.

These films are actually pretty good at poking (gently) at our many hypocrisies. The first Devil Wears Prada gave us a distinctly American portrait of labor, one in which a horrible boss was merely a catalyst for our self-actualization; Miranda’s judgmental, demeaning attitude ultimately helped Andy become the best version of herself. Miranda lies at the heart of the new film’s unease as well. This time, she’s less a horrible boss and more a desperate one — calm and collected on the surface, but secretly panicking about the declining fortunes of publishing and of her own place in it. That’s not a bad idea for an expansion of the character, and Streep, who despite a recent run of less-than-impressive parts remains one of our greatest actors, is certainly the right person for the job: She can give Miranda that frisson of fragility without necessarily softening her edges.

But this figure’s meme-ification over the past two decades also means that she can never really be a villain; the script must ultimately resolve things in such a way that just about everyone gets off scot-free. Let’s not forget that the first Devil Wears Prada was produced by Twentieth Century Fox, a studio that effectively no longer exists, having been consumed some years ago by the Walt Disney Company. Maybe that’s why this new movie — in which billionaires, to paraphrase fellow Fox property Homer Simpson, are the cause of and solution to most of life’s problems — winds up feeling like even more of a fairy tale than the original. It’s probably going to make a billion dollars.