The Devil Wears Prada is a sharp-tongued, viciously funny, and curt gaze into the cut-throat lifestyle fashion anchors. Starring recent Northwestern University graduate Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) as she becomes junior personal assistant to fashion magazine Runway editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), viewers get a glimpse into the unmerciful and all-consuming lifestyle going into the fashion industry requires. While insisting from the start to remain true to her goal of using the job to establish other journalistic connections, Sachs quickly becomes consumed––by Priestly’s outrageous requests, her consistently bashful senior co-worker Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), and fashion’s merciless and stressful 24-hour cycle of demand and change. Though she tries to balance between the fashion industry and her boyfriend, friends, and original goals, she quickly learns she cannot have both. She must choose between her old life and the new path unfolding and whether happiness or professional success is more valuable to her before she loses it all.

Prada is conniving, devilish, and amusingly barbaric in its characters’ behaviors and personalities. Its sharply layered plotting, enrichingly nasty cast, and seemingly effortless verbal insults and injuries make this a prickly, poignant gaze into these lifestyles. The people in them must sacrifice everything, including their personal dignity and close friends’ careers, without letting their consciences shatter them. To do so, they become outwardly and openly cruel; happiness and empathy are for the weak and the “million girls [who] would kill for that job” who cannot handle its burdens. Viscerally unrelenting dialogue that forces laughs out of pure nerves from all the characters translates these needs, and their eventual influence over Sachs’s life demonstrates how toxically manipulative these environments are. Sachs’s well-introduced opposing persona to those in the fashion world makes her eventual unconscious assimilation all the sadder, with each choice driving the knife deeper.

Speaking of personae, the cast is also to thank for this. As the bloodless editor-in-chief, Streep gives Priestly’s character an irresistibly intimidating and core-shaking persona, zipping lips of all on- and off-screen when she enters. Hathaway portrays Sachs with charismatic ordinariness that turns into anxious, fashion-people-pleasing obsessiveness. She perfectly encapsulates not just the normal (and expected) reactions to such cruelty but how easy it is to fall into the same traps. Blunt is fierce with every line, making sure even standard information being delivered is condescending and personally hurtful. The film often stumbles in focusing on these lifestyles instead of a fully fleshed narrative, and it is wildly unevenly paced to the point where it’s sometimes hard to focus on anything. Nevertheless, because of a star-studded cast, a fatal representation of the fashion industry, and laughably anxiety-inducing writing make The Devil Wears Prada a rollercoaster not to be missed.

Screens Monday, 5/6, 7:00pm @ Coolidge
Part of the ongoing repertory series: Big Screen Classics