Twenty years on, the old team is back, dressed better than ever and given rather less to do. It is amiable, well acted and easy company for two hours, and it says nothing about the death of magazines that a magazine has not already said.
Twenty years after The Devil Wears Prada, David Frankel and the writer Aline Brosh McKenna have got the band back together. Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs, once the assistant who fetched the coffee, is back in the orbit of Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, and the two square off again at a time when print magazines are dying, artificial intelligence is circling what is left, and a scandal is only ever one post away. The tagline says icons reign forever. The film is decent company, well acted, well dressed and a little frightened of upsetting anyone, and it is about as pointed as that tagline.
The cast is the reason to go, and the cast knows it. Streep plays Miranda as before, barely moving, saying less than anyone at the table and being heard by all of them, and she can still make a pause in a meeting feel like a sacking. Emily Blunt’s Emily Charlton gets the sharpest lines and delivers them as if each one has been rationed. Stanley Tucci’s Nigel returns as Andy’s ally and quietly walks off with every scene he is in. Hathaway holds the middle, which is the thankless job, and does it with the same open-faced decency that made Andy worth following the first time.
We laughed, properly and more than once, mostly at Blunt and Tucci and mostly in the first hour. Then, somewhere past the midpoint, we noticed we were waiting for the next line rather than caring what happened, and that nobody on screen seemed in any danger of losing anything they minded about. The first film ran on a real question: what Andy would give up to be good at a job she despised. This one does not ask her for much.
McKenna’s script has the right subject and the wrong method. The money leaving magazines, the machines that write copy, the sponsors who now have a say in what gets published: all of it is here, and nearly all of it arrives as someone explaining it across a desk. Andy is told what is at stake, we are told with her, and then the film cuts to a frock. A film about luxury that has plainly been paid for by luxury has a problem, and this one never solves it; the satire stops exactly where the sponsors would start to mind.
Florian Ballhaus, who shot the original, lights this one bright and clean, so that every room looks like a shop window and every face looks rested. Jess Gonchor’s production design keeps the magazine’s world expensive and a little too quiet, so the decline is visible in the rooms before anyone states it. Molly Rogers’s costumes are the best writing in the film: who has money, who is pretending and who has stopped caring is clear from the clothes long before the dialogue gets round to it. Theodore Shapiro’s score is brisk and cheerful and never once suggests anything might go wrong. Andrew Marcus cuts it to 119 minutes and keeps it moving, which is a kindness, since the story has perhaps ninety in it.
The newcomers are short-changed. Kenneth Branagh, Justin Theroux, Lucy Liu and Simone Ashley all arrive with a name and a purpose and are given rather less to do than their billing suggests. Miranda herself, the one character who ought to be unbreakable, is pushed by the plot into corners the first film would never have let her near, and Streep plays each of them with such conviction that you only notice afterwards how little sense they made. The final stretch softens into sentiment we will not describe.
The 2006 film was a comedy with a cruel streak, and the cruelty was the point: it knew what this world costs. The sequel likes everyone too much to send the bill. Go with someone who loved the first one, and go for the cast. Do not go expecting to learn anything about the state of magazines that you could not learn from the state of magazines.
