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• DEVIL WEARS PROTA MOVIE

The worlds of high fashion and slick journalism, a convenient backdrop for Ms.

DEVIL WEARS PROTA MOVIE

It is a movie unapologetically, or maybe semi-apologetically, fascinated with power. How, really, could it be otherwise? In Hollywood, for one thing, an abused assistant is, like a Toyota Prius, an indispensable accessory - an entitlement, really - for anyone who even wants to seem powerful.Īnd while the film makes some gestures of sympathy toward the underlings, it does not stray too far into class-conscious hypocrisy. No longer simply the incarnation of evil, she is now a vision of aristocratic, purposeful and surprisingly human grace.Īnd the movie, while noting that she can be sadistic, inconsiderate and manipulative, is unmistakably on Miranda's side. Streep's Miranda inspires both terror and a measure of awe.

With her silver hair and pale skin, her whispery diction as perfect as her posture, Ms. But the screen Miranda is played by Meryl Streep, an actress who carries nuance in her every pore, and who endows even her lighthearted comic roles with a rich implication of inner life. Weisberger, restricting herself to Andy's point of view and no doubt giving voice to her own loathing of the real-life editor on whom Miranda is modeled, resisted the temptation to make her villain a complex (or even a terribly interesting) character. Does the movie, especially in the way it imagines Miranda, betray the novel or correct it? When these specialists convene a learned panel to discuss their findings, a vigorous debate is likely to emerge. I will leave the business of point-by-point comparison to scholars, who will duly note that the screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna, and the director, David Frankel, have reimagined a few characters, discarded some plot developments and implanted others, and switched Andy's alma mater from Brown to Northwestern.

But now that "The Devil Wears Prada" is a movie, starring Anne Hathaway as Andy, the lesson is not quite so unambiguous. Weisberger's moral was simple, and hard to dispute: Nobody, however glamorous, successful or celebrated, has the right to treat another person the way Miranda treats her assistants, in particular the narrator, an eager Ivy Leaguer named Andy (short for Andrea) Sachs.

Its portrait of Miranda Priestly, the imperious editor of a glossy rag called Runway, is a collage of unforgiven slights and unforgotten grudges, glued to the page with pure, righteous venom. For the legions who have suffered the caprice and cruelty of a tyrannical boss, "The Devil Wears Prada," Lauren Weisberger's best-selling roman à clef about a bright young woman's brief period of servitude at a fashion magazine, provides the satisfaction of vicarious payback. But a great many people, men and women alike, heroic at least in their own estimation, have assistants, who scurry after coffee and dry cleaning, endure bursts of foul temper, bask in tiny glimmers of generosity and dream, for long hours at low wages, of revenge. So the saying goes, or used to go, since few men these days actually have valets.