An abysmal sequel only the media class can enjoy
‘This is abysmal timing!” is the cleverest line in The Devil Wears Prada 2. Clever because it describes how Andrea (Anne Hathaway) is personally offended by being one of the journalists affected by mass firings at her publication. Clever, because The Devil Wears Prada 2 is also an abysmal response to our distrust of journalism.
This sequel to the 2006 half-camp satire The Devil Wears Prada revisits Andrea; her Cruella de Vil–style former boss Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), who is the editrix at Runway fashion magazine; and her still-conniving former colleague Emily (Emily Blunt). But now these career girls (which includes Andrea’s snide but groveling gay Runway confidant Nigel, overacted by Stanley Tucci) now inhabit a Trumpian world where the fate of journalism reflects recent turmoil across the media landscape. It’s laughable that these vixens don’t blame themselves for the rot in their own industry.
The Devil Wears Prada franchise never had much sense of humor to lose; its combination of fashion and feminist aspiration was a knock-off of HBO’s 2006 Sex and the City series, but minus that show’s airy licentiousness. The class striving of schlumpy Andrea and nervous Emily, both desperately groveling before their imperious role-model employer, updated the 1980s graffiti “Die, Yuppie Scum” — minus the shame. (It was a post-Clinton daydream.)
Ditzy Andrea is one of those career climbers who ascends by luck. Her ironic sense of fashion includes wearing an ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union) T-shirt under a blazer — not a sign of talent or hard work, it proves that Devil Wears Prada 2 flaunts the gentrification of journalism. Andrea shamelessly returns to Runway magazine, harboring a plan to write a book-length exposé of Miranda Priestly; mostly, she shows off her privilege as part of the undying snotty-media class. In Andrea’s scheme, fancying herself one of Miranda’s peers, she’s a cohort of billionaires (Lucy Liu, Justin Theroux) who conduct company takeovers, while ensuring her own status as an arrogant tastemaker. Andrea exemplifies media shills who all think alike and write in lockstep. (Miranda issues their ultimate judgment: “You’re not a visionary, you’re a vandal.”)
It’s no joke that The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens with a shindig called “NYPC Journalism Awards” where Andrea wins a prize and, in her acceptance speech, tearfully, angrily declares journalism’s importance to society. This is too much like the defensiveness of Fake News minions who consider their biases to be above reproach. Only numbskulls could fail to see the irony, and throughout the press screening, attendees could be heard giggling and swooning over the wacky couture wardrobe and cute insider badinage at the offices of Runway magazine. It’s a movie for the benighted throng who imagine themselves 1 percenters.
In his memoir The Chiffon Trenches, André Leon Talley, Vogue editor at large, confessed the emotional reality of fashion media. Speaking of infamous Vogue editor Anna Wintour, he writes, “What drives Anna is a sense of her own ability to survive as a powerbroker, with sheer brute force, and to sustain an extraordinary level of success.” But this silly movie franchise disavows those complications.
Director David Frankel (son of New York Times executive editor Max Frankel) develops no narrative pace. Each sequence is intended to remind whatever cult the franchise has of the tired jokes they remember from 20 years ago. Streep’s fatigued hauteur is truly weary now. No longer impersonating Wintour, Streep strikes bitchy poses — a guise as unprepossessing as when haggard Wintour herself stood charmless at the Academy Awards to approve/promote this sequel. There’s no mention of the emotional scarring that Wintour, notorious political activist (and Melania Trump hater), left in her wake.
Each of Frankel’s sitcom setups is goosed by jittery music to pretend excitement, first at a Hamptons brunch and then a Milan fashion show where celebrity cameos flash by to provide ballast — Tina Brown, Donatella Versace, George Wolfe, Jon Batiste, Jenna Bush Hager, John Legend by proxy, Kara Swisher. Finally, Lady Gaga appears, a sorry surprise, matching her own goofy self-importance to Streep’s.
Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna gather some of the worst people in the world to celebrate their shared privilege. This abysmal film hits bottom when Miranda observes Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper fresco at the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan — rented out for a Runway magazine confab — and twists Leonardo’s theme to explain her demonic vision of the world and how it works: “We let each other down. It’s what we’re built to do.” Despite her earlier speech about “beauty, artistry and the best of human achievement,” this harridan personifies the hatred rampant in our ruined culture, now reduced to a rummage sale.
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Flashback: Several summers ago, I noticed many, many DVDs of The Devil Wears Prada being unloaded at New York City neighborhood stoop sales, evidence of buyer’s remorse, proof that nobody wanted it anymore. In time, the ghastliness of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and its enormous hype will be revealed as an egocentric enterprise for moribund communications industries. For now, just know that if ever there was a yuppie-scum movie for the millennium, this is it.
