The last time that Andy Sachs, the journalist heroine of “The Devil Wears Prada,” saw her title nemesis, she was in New York and headed into the unknown. It was 2006, George W. Bush was in the White House, the United States was at war in the Middle East, and journalism was on the ropes. A Pew Research study that year had asked if the era would be remembered as the moment when print journalism had begun to die. One seemingly undimmable industry bright spot was Vogue’s September issue, which that year — with Kirsten Dunst dolled up as Marie Antoinette on the cover — ran 840, ad-rich pages.
Based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 best-selling roman à clef of the same title, the first movie is a frothy, catty professional coming-of-age story that centers on the cosseted adventures of Andy (Anne Hathaway), after she’s hired as an assistant at the fictional Runway fashion magazine. When the book hit, Weisberger insisted that Runway’s queenly terror, Miranda Priestly, wasn’t based on Vogue’s longtime editor, Anna Wintour, which exactly no one believed but was tasty grist for the rumor mill. In the end, it didn’t much matter. Meryl Streep’s turn as Miranda was so vivid, so strong and exactingly detailed that the performance stood on its own; it was almost easy to forget that the character could have been inspired by anyone.
Andy and Miranda are again squaring off in “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” but their antagonisms now pale next to the internet-driven, world-shaping shift that is violently upending their lives. Like the first movie, the second is a sleek diversion with brittle and sharp laughs, truckloads of couture threads and lashings of light drama. It’s strategically aspirational, presenting an ostensibly enviable world of unimaginable wealth that it critiques with a straight face before its characters slip into a car with a six-figure price tag. Now a serious, award-winning journalist, Andy talks about scoring pre-owned couture finds and addresses the ethics of expensive apartments not long before she moves into her own.
One of the facile pleasures of the first movie is that its knowing, winking approach to the hyperbolic excesses of Miranda and her minions discouraged you from thinking too hard about the real costs (personal, social, environmental) of this high-flying world. The second movie, by contrast, turns on a series of crises, beginning with two grimly familiar ones — Andy loses her job when her publication shuts down, and Runway is caught up in a sweatshop scandal — that set the stage for the larger, existential catastrophe to come. Soon after being laid off, Andy returns to Runway to help repair its reputation, a rescue mission that grows more intense because of the financial threats facing the magazine and its dominatrix-in-chief. There’s also some filler (facial and otherwise) and a love interest, all inconsequential.
Journalism’s agonies gives the sequel a touch more heft than the original, though in truth the troubles that continue to rock the Fourth Estate are only part of what has unsettled Andy and Miranda as well as their colleagues. Also back in action are Emily Blunt’s viperish Emily, another of Miranda’s former assistants; and Stanley Tucci’s Nigel, Miranda’s suave, unerringly faithful second. Emily now works at Dior, which means that the brand is heavily featured throughout the movie. She’s also still giving Andy grief, a role that she embraces ferociously when she hooks up with a tech billionaire, Benji Barnes (an unrecognizable Justin Theroux as a Jeff Bezos type), a loutish smiler who’s far more monstrous than Miranda ever could be.
As the story jumps from New York to Europe and back, the director David Frankel keeps everything briskly moving, sandwiching the talk-driven scenes in between skyline images and salivating shots of vast estates. He wisely gives his four main performers plenty of room to show off their comic timing; they’re clearly enjoying themselves, which heightens the pleasure of watching talented actors getting their collective groove on. And because Aline Brosh McKenna’s script gives Miranda more to do, Streep finds new layers and shading for a character who, the first time around, didn’t do all that much other than eviscerate terrified employees in sotto voce or smash her coat down on an assistant’s desk.
Miranda’s transformation over the two movies, from a near-mythic power to a suddenly, almost shockingly vulnerable human target of a more dangerous power, puts the movie’s themes into stark, recognizably contemporary relief. Like its predecessor — and like many other Hollywood movies that poke harmless fun at the rich and famous — “The Devil Wears Prada 2” invites you into a realm of rarefied privilege that encourages you to lust after and laugh at. Lust is good for business, after all, and laughter helps ease class resentment. This sentiment might sound cynical, but compared to the dehumanizing world that Barnes, the smiling tech billionaire, threatens to unleash, it’s positively Utopian.
The Devil Wears Prada 2
Rated PG-13 for exploitation and despair. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters.
