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As
the dog days of summer settle in and temperatures crest over 100
degrees, Hollywood plies us with its usual summer schedule of chick
flicks, gore fests, and family blockbusters—except for a sprinkling
of an indie or documentary or two, the operative word here is “fluff.”
 And what a relief
when the fluff is enjoyable. As I hesitatingly purchased my ticket
one broiling afternoon for The Devil Wears Prada, I steeled myself
for what I anticipated to be a dreary (but air-conditioned) experience,
like the misbegotten Zellweger/McGregor vehicle, Down with Love.
What I found instead was a smart, funny update of the Doris Day
woman’s film, where Day finds herself in a series of screwball
situations that twist and turn into the inevitable resolution, when
she finds true love and/or career as the credits roll. Okay, back
in the Day day, career and romance was usually an either-or proposition,
but the updated narrative has lost none of its punch, if Devil is
any indication. While Down with Love fetishizes the conventions
of the genre, mocking its homilies on life and love, Devil updates
its sturdy themes: how can a woman be true to herself, find love,
and now, in a bow to modernity, find work with personal meaning,
all at the same time?
 Meryl Streep
breathes fire as editor Miranda Priestly (purportedly a take on
Vogue editor Anna Wintour) against Anne Hathaway’s recent
college graduate and very serious 20-something Andy Sachs. Miranda,
intrigued by Andy’s spunk and total lack of fashion sense,
hires her as the Second Assistant, a job that requires a cheerful,
militarily efficient execution of every and all demeaning, impossible
tasks that the Queen of Mean can think up--or that the First Assistant
can delegate down. After all, Miranda and all her literati connections
are a rich reward; her trial by fire job is designed to test the
mettle of any aspirant to her world, the high stakes, take-no-prisoners
business of le haute monde.
 Director David Frankel (also of Sex And The City) and writer Aline Brosh McKenna create complex characters who reveal themselves convincingly. We discover that Andy is a bit of a user herself and Miranda’s
soul is not wholly made of crushed glass. Her wise, acerbic putdown of Andy’s arrogant I-am-so-above- this-fashion-thing stance
serves as the emotional turning point of the movie, allowing us to buy into Andy’s emotional growth in the final reels. Watching
Andy and her fiendish boss wrestle their sensibilities (and each other’s) proves as enjoyable a diversion as an ice cream cone
in August—not to mention that it allows us to revel in the talent and the beauty--and, oh, the clothes!--of the deadly serious ‘fluff’ that is fashion.
-- Patricia Ducey
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