‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Review: A Rhapsody in Cerulean
《穿著Prada的惡魔2》：蔚藍狂想曲
The last time that Andy Sachs, the journalist hero of “The Devil Wears Prada,” saw her title nemesis, she was in New York and headed into the unknown. It was 2006, George W. Bush was in the White House, the United States was at war in the Middle East, and journalism was on the ropes.
A Pew Research study that year had asked if the era would be remembered as the moment when print journalism had begun to die. One seemingly undimmable industry bright spot was Vogue’s September issue, which that year — with Kirsten Dunst dolled up as Marie Antoinette on the cover — ran 840, ad-rich pages.
Based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 bestselling roman à clef of the same title, the first movie is a frothy, catty professional coming-of-age story that centers on the cosseted adventures of Andy (Anne Hathaway), after she’s hired as an assistant at the fictional Runway fashion magazine. When the book hit, Weisberger insisted that Runway’s queenly terror, Miranda Priestly, wasn’t based on Vogue’s longtime editor, Anna Wintour, which exactly no one believed but was tasty grist for the rumor mill.
In the end, it didn’t much matter. Meryl Streep’s turn as Miranda was so vivid, so strong and exactingly detailed that the performance stood on its own; it was almost easy to forget that the character could have been inspired by anyone.
Journalism’s agonies gives the sequel a touch more heft than the original, though in truth the troubles that continue to rock the Fourth Estate are only part of what has unsettled Andy and Miranda as well as their colleagues.
Also back in action are Emily Blunt’s viperish Emily, another of Miranda’s former assistants; and Stanley Tucci’s Nigel, Miranda’s suave, unerringly faithful second. Emily now works at Dior, which means that the brand is heavily featured throughout the movie. She hooks up with a tech billionaire, Benji Barnes (an unrecognizable Justin Theroux as a Jeff Bezos type), a loutish smiler who’s far more monstrous than Miranda ever could be.
Like its predecessor — and like many other Hollywood movies that poke harmless fun at the rich and famous — “The Devil Wears Prada 2” invites you into a realm of rarefied privilege that encourages you to lust after and laugh at.
Lust is good for business, after all, and laughter helps ease class resentment. This sentiment might sound cynical, but compared to the dehumanizing world that Barnes, the smiling tech billionaire, threatens to unleash, it’s positively Utopian.
