'The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Is an Engaging Sequel, Until It Tries to Save Publishing

(SPOT.ph) The Devil Wears Prada 2 picks up twenty years since the events of the last movie, with Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) now a veteran journalist who has just won an award for her reporting. But at the awards ceremony, she and her colleagues all find out they’re being laid off, their newspaper recently having been sold to an equity firm. She is suddenly offered a position at Runway, the fashion magazine where she started her career, run by the imperious Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). It turns out Runway is undergoing a credibility scandal, and Andy is brought in to give the magazine some respectability.

This sequel has two central modes that don’t exactly mesh with each other. Half of it plays out the fantasy of working at the high end fashion magazine, with Andy getting to live it up wearing luxury fashion pieces and rubbing elbows with celebrities, many of whom show up in the movie playing themselves. The other end of it involves a narrative about the current state of publishing, where magazines need an online component that prioritizes going viral over good work, and business people loom overhead, constantly posing the threat of slashing budgets, laying off people, and altogether misunderstanding what makes a publication vital.

What the movie never really reconciles is how the world of luxury that Runway celebrates is also part of the problem. Andy will occasionally voice an acknowledgement of how capitalist forces are ruining everything, but at the same time she still buys into all of it. We’re told that she’s trying to do more serious stories at Runway, but we don’t get to see much of what she’s actually doing. The film plays the effort at landing an interview with a reclusive billionaire as proof of Andy’s tenacity as a journalist, but it still seems a distant cry from the kind of reporting she is said to have done for more serious publications.

Here is the thing, though: the movie is still really engaging in spite of that problem. It moves fairly well, can often alternate between funny and poignant, and is overloaded with charming performances. Hathaway plays Andy Sachs as someone who has never really stopped being awkward, but has leaned into it in a way that makes her all the more competent. She is earnest and awkward and all the more likable for it. Streep, of course, is a titan, and will quietly deploy moments of vulnerability that make Miranda more than just a cartoonish figure. Stanley Tucci returns as Nigel, and the inherent decency of the character always shines through.

But the movie as a whole tries to have it both ways, and this poses a problem. It is perhaps most evident in the solution it comes up with to save Runway from the forces that seek to destroy it. While The Devil Wears Prada 2 manages to take a trenchant look at the way capitalism has damaged the publishing industry and continues to pose a threat to whatever it is that people hold dear in magazines and the like, it ultimately reverts to capitalistic fantasy; this fiction, essentially, that there can still be good done in a system that allows such a great gap in wealth between the ruling class and the working class.

This does not make The Devil Wears Prada 2 a bad movie. It is in fact hard to imagine someone who enjoyed the first movie finding fault in this sequel, as it is able to deliver many of the same pleasures. The acting is great, the fashion is divine, and the catty dialogue is as catty as ever. And again, while it proves to be a fundamental contradiction to what the movie ends up doing, its depiction of the current struggle of publishing feels largely accurate, much of it seemingly drawn from real experiences. There’s just something about the dress that doesn’t quite fit, making it more uncomfortable to wear than it really ought to be.

Rating: 3.5 stars