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PLOT: Meryl Streep is the ultimate boss from hell in this comedy based on the infamous bestseller by a former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Anne Hathaway plays Streep's much abused junior assistant who struggles between pleasing "fashion's dragon lady," and saving her own soul.
We've all had the boss from hell. So viewers will be able to relate to Anne Hathaway's plight in The Devil Wears Prada, in which she plays a journalism graduate who finds herself hired as the junior assistant to the fashion world's most powerful magazine editor Miranda Priestly.
Sounds like a major break, right?
Except that Hathaway's character, Andy Sachs, is super-serious with no sense of style which makes her the perfect target for the vicious tongue of Priestly, deliciously realized by Meryl Streep
A cross between Cruella De Vil and Simon Cowell, Streep's Priestly is a stylish, demanding, blunt-speaking barracuda with incredible accessories.
Miranda insists all her employees wear stilettos, absent-mindedly hurls her fur coats and animal-skin bags on Andy's desk, demands her morning Starbucks at a certain temperature, requires a plane out of Miami during a hurricane, and seeks an unpublished Harry Potter manuscript for her twin daughters, and so on.
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You know the type.
The movie is based on the bestseller of the same name, written by a former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour, so we can only surmise that's who Streep's character is supposed to be.
And yet, no surprise, the 13-time Oscar nominee makes Priestly distinctly her own creation.
The key to Streep's marvelous, laugh-out-loud performance is that she never once raises her voice.
Instead, it's a cold, hard, withering look, as she peers over her two-toned white-black glasses and delivers a terse, "that's all," that sums up her innate power.
Priestly's spot-on fashion sense, meanwhile, is courtesy of stylist Patricia Field of Sex And The City fame, and director David Frankel (Entourage, Sex And The City) certainly knows his way around glamorous locales, and makes the most of those in both New York City and Paris.
Hathaway, poor soul, is a great beauty but clearly out of her league here as an actress, although all those little girls who flocked to The Princess Diaries and its sequel will love to see her character morph from a sweater-and-skirt-wearing geek to a head-to-toe Chanel fashionista.
If only Frankel had cast a young actress with a bit more weight -- Maggie Gyllenhaal? -- to go mano a mano with Streep on screen and made the satire a bit darker.
Also, the subplot involving Andy and her long-suffering boyfriend (played by Entourage's Adrian Grenier), is tedious and takes precious screen time away from Streep and her two hilarious sidekicks -- Stanley Tucci as her right hand man and British actress Emily Blunt as her equally wicked senior assistant.
BOTTOM LINE: 13-time Oscar nominee Streep may rack up yet another nomination for her tour-de-force performance as a fashionista on steroids. She gleefully steals this movie from weak co-star Anne Hathaway while fellow scenery chewers Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt are also very, very funny.
(This film is rated PG)