Do Your Job
When Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) lets her hair down with Andrea Sachs (played by Ann Hathaway) in Paris, after she has let Andrea know that Miranda's husband, Steven, does not need to be picked up at the airport since he has decided to sue for divorce, Andrea fully identifying with Miranda's situation (one can see it so well in Ann Hathaway's face, and one should not underestimate Ann Hathaway's performance), asks Miranda, "Is there anything else I can do?" Miranda quickly settles back into her normal "hauteur" and replies, "Your job."
That is exactly what one can say that everyone involved with this film has done. The writer of the screenplay, McKenna (if I remember correctly) has gone farther than the original book by Lauren Weisberger and has given the devil her due. The cutting and editing are simply perfect. The music is admirably chosen and sometimes proves to be a link between one scene and another (e.g., between Andrea's scene with her boyfriend Nate and the quick cut to the Urban Jungle shoot). (It is well worth buying the CD for the music, as I have done as well.) One has to see this movie more than one time and it is well worth doing so. It is easy to notice Meryl Streep's admirable performance at first, but another viewing lets one see the slow but perfect development of Andrea (an everyman -- or everywoman -- a Faustian character, e.g., Emily's comment: "I knew you sold your soul when you tried on your first pair of Jimmy Choo's." But Stanley Tucci's (Nigel) and Emily Blunt's (Emily) roles are simply perfect as well. Even the minor characters, Nate and Christian, are really well done, though they are perhaps more "fifth business" rather than central characers, even though they are central characters, but somewhat sketchily developed. Nigel's (Tucci), "[Fashion] It's art, but greater than art, because it's something which you wear on your back -- well, not you, but some people," etc. and the comment by the Newspaper Editor at the end of the movie about some snooty girl, such a fun, perfect, snooty girl. One can see her other side when she tells Andrea's successor, "You have big shoes to fill."
One can go on and on, one can comment on every scene, every line, but the sum of it is where I began. It is as if Miranda Priestly was in charge of everything and everyone did their job. (If the whole thing was a take on Vogue's Anna Wintour -- or her predecessors, Grace Mirabella or Diana Vreeland -- or her counterparts at other similar publications, like Harper's Bazaar, none of them should feel any objection at all, for in the end, they all did their job, or as Andrea told Christian, (paraphrase) "If it were a man doing Miranda's job, there would be no criticism."
I watched the movie in the theater 10 times and on the DVD I watched it again, and then again with the Director's comments and the deleted scenes. The deleted scenes were wonderful, but, yes, they were rightly deleted from the movie itself, to pace it properly (so once again, everyone did their job).
The last time I was so impressed with a film was in 1979 with the movie "Time after Time," starring Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenbergen and about H.G. Well's really having a time machine and coming to 1979 with Jack the Ripper a.k.a., his friend, a Doctor Stevenson. In that movie, there was only one scene (in the bank) which I thought didn't fit, but otherwise, well put together.
It isn't that a movie is (or attempts to be) profound. "Apocalypse Now" had profound inRead full review
