Why I Pretty Much Hated "The Devil Wears Prada"

There was a moment at the end of The Devil Wears Prada when I felt as though the whole movie might have been redeemed. The movie is about the allure of power...success...and, I suppose fashion fits in as well. The young novice character (Anne Hathaway) gets a job working for a super-influential clothing designer. Guess what? Our novice knows nothing about clothes, nor does she give a rat's patootie for fashion. Guess what else? By the end of the movie her rags turn to riches (cliches seem appropriate here) and she becomes one of "them"... By "them", you know what I mean...those rich folks in the high rises, snooty, consumed with their jobs and absolutely nothing else. (To be fair at this point, I should point out that Meryl Streep does a good job with her character.) The good guys are Hathaway's friends at the bar, the bad guys are the ones making money. So, our rookie fashion character is slowly pulled to the dark side...and, there's this scene where Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway are in the car together and Meryl Streep tells her devoted protege that they are quite similar...they're made out of the same material, if you will. It's at this moment that I thought the movie was coming together. If the last 1.5 hours of light-hearted display of transformation into a snooty fashion figure were for a purpose...and, if this purpose was to show how easy it is to be sucked into a vice....then, we were on to something good. What if Meryl Streep had used her cunning to trap Anne Hathaway into a situation she really could not get out of? What if Anne Hathaway at this moment discovered that she did love her career and her power and her new wardrobe more than everything else in the world...and she decided to continue down this road?

Because it is easy to get trapped in a situation that is pretty horrible because a bunch of little slippery steps have caused you to slide into this spot you never thought you'd end up in. And, in a movie depicting this, I can see how this process could be displayed as it was in The Devil Wears Prada. So, at this moment of the movie, I was hoping for a little severity. I was hoping that she was stuck in the bed she had made...I was hoping that she discovered that she was just like Meryl Streep's character...I was hoping for a little of Al Pacino / Keanu Reeves in The Devil's Advocate and less of what I'd been fed up to this point.

Well, Anne Hathaway gets out of the car, tosses her cell phone in the fountain, and gets a regular job of her dreams. ...There are basically no repercussions to her actions over the course of the movie. She gets what she wants and all is good in the world. In my mind this ruins what was shaping up to be merely an average movie anyway. How bad is a situation that has no repercussions? I mean, really, are we concerned at all about realism if you can screw your friends and your family, work yourself to death and then pause and go back to normal. If the non-repercussion part of the movie is real, then, the rest of the movie that portrays Anne Hathaway as heading for trouble is a lie. I don't see how both can be true.

Like I said, it wasn't that great of a movie to begin with. And, as always, I'm reading too much into this little popcorn flick. But, as an easily annoyed person, this one bugged me with its basic lie and its flippant ending.