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2006’s The Devil Wears Prada was a big movie. It made a star of Emily Blunt and it presented a proper step up into grown up roles for teen actor Anne Hathaway as well as getting an eleventh Oscar nomination for Meryl Streep. Now it is fairly considered a bit of a modern classic providing an engaging story in the seductive world of fashion with strong characters and a clear message about staying true to yourself and not losing everything to ambition. 

It also involves a compelling examination of how a person can develop a desire to impress an overbearing boss rather than walking away or challenging the behaviour. The fact that the manager in question here, Streep’s magazine editor Miranda Priestley, is a thinly veiled version of the real editor of American Vogue Anna Wintour added further interest. The writer of the source novel Lauren Weisburger had worked as an assistant to Wintour just as Hathaway’s Andy does for Priestly and the fact that this film then worked as both exposé and satire gave it an additional edge. 

Now, twenty years later, it holds up for all the reasons it was a hit in the first place. The only thing that really dates it are the shots of women putting on underwear over the opening credits but it does also have an uncomfortably forgiving approach to workplace bullying. It is more than just Streep’s Priestly that are guilty of this as well, although she is the true devil of the title, and all of the offending characters are presented sympathetically. Stanley Tucci’s Nigel is horrible to Andy at the start but this is all forgiven and forgotten (partly because it is genuinely funny) and Blunt’s Emily is ultimately a semi tragic character so she is seemingly allowed to openly demean Andy too. The film presents a toxic environment as somehow acceptable, or even appropriate, because if you can survive it you will seemingly be a better person – like teachers being mean to students in a boy’s schools to make men of them. The message here is problematic in a contemporary context. 

Priestly herself never has a moment of redemption and it is actually to the film’s credit that she remains a monster as anything else would have felt like a cliched cop out. She is shown to have a sadness beneath the brutality but this doesn’t make her conduct okay. Of course it is fiction and it needs all of this to create the drama, and allegedly it is fact too so it’s just telling it like it is. Besides, if the coutured dragon had been slain then there’d have been no potential for a sequel would there. 

Here we are then with that sequel, two decades later. Unlike the heavy slate of other legacy sequels though, this actually makes sense. It works for the story because Andy would have needed to have had some time away to even consider reapproaching this world. The second novel Revenge Wears Prada came (and is  set) ten years after the first for this same reason and so in kind this has had to wait.

As well as growing older, it feels like this tale has also grown up. The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels like a much more sophisticated film than what came before and in many ways the narrative is deeper. It is interesting that a film that showcased beauty and fashion was in retrospect a bit superficial and this one pushes things in a way so few of these belated continuations do. Certainly the characterisation is much more involved here. Hathaway’s Andy is believably a more experienced and lived version of what we once was and it is great to see Meryl Streep add much more to what was already one of her most enduring characters. Miranda Priestly is not as two dimensional as she initially was and as such is not as much the cartoon villain. I don’t suppose this will get her what would now be her twenty second Oscar nom but it probably should (a Golden Globe nod on the other hand is guaranteed).

It is possible that Emily Blunt’s Emily Charlton is not as well developed and the film doesn’t seem as sure of what to do with her, using her as more of a plot device than the others. Tucci, like Miranda, is thankfully softened and what we are left with here is the kindly uncle figure he always should have been.

In terms of the new cast members, Caleb Hearon manages to register more as one of the new people in Andy’s old position than Simone Ashley does. Justin Theroux seems to be essaying a character from a very different type of film but just about gets away with it and Kenneth Branagh brings lovely support as Miranda’s current husband. It is perhaps curious that an actor of Branagh’s status would take such a small role (when he and Hathaway first share a scene I imagined them discussing how their mutual friend Christopher Nolan was doing). 

Branagh though has a much bigger part than a lot of people who are almost as famous. Familiar faces from the fashion world get two seconds of screen time here and there and Lady Gaga appears but only in a cameo. 

What is curious, given where this story came from in the first place, is a narrative thread around whether Andy should sell out her one time boss with a tell all book and I wasn’t sure if this was a dig at Lauren Weisburger. If there ever was a conflict between the young writer and the powerful take no prisoners editor in real life then in the fictional world the film is siding more with the latter than it originally did. By all accounts Anna Wintour has come to terms with how she is apparently portrayed, at least on screen if not the page (she recently posed with Meryl Streep in character for the cover of her own magazine). The resolution of this sub plot leaves things in an interesting place that seems to let everyone off the hook and may reflect Wintour’s own perspective on the whole thing now.

Speaking of pictures, what is going on with Anne Hathaway on the poster? It looks like different photos of either side of her face her spliced together. 

In the end I have to declare The Devil Wears Prada 2 a real success. It has a few references to the last movie, mostly at the start, but it doesn’t dine out on past glories as much as a lot of legacy sequels do. What it does instead is tell a new story with these old characters and it is one of sophistication and class, just as it should be. 

My hopes for The Princess Diaries 3 have just been elevated. 

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