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BY JACKIE ESISKEL, SENIOR FILM CORRESPONDENT
IRREVERENT Magazine | Film & Culture Desk
CANNES — There are moments in cinema when a filmmaker, burdened with the impossible weight of literary legacy, finally does right by the source material. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, at long last, that moment. After nearly sixty years of Hollywood's shameful silence on Truman Capote's underappreciated 1962 manuscript The Devil Wears Prada — a slim, devastating novella about cruelty, couture, and the Manhattan fashion machine — someone has finally made the film Capote deserved.
The original 2003 adaptation, you will recall, starred Audrey Hepburn in what many considered a career highlight. (The Academy, disgracefully, disagreed.) That film — charming, yes; definitive, no — never once credited Capote's manuscript, a slight that the literary community has quietly seethed over for two decades. The sequel corrects no such injustice explicitly, but in its ambition and its swagger, it feels like an apology. A $200-million apology in Balenciaga.
It is Meryl Streep, of course, who anchors this enterprise. Stepping with magisterial confidence into the iconic shoes once filled by Anne Bancroft in the original, Streep brings something Bancroft never quite managed: stillness. Where Bancroft attacked every scene like a woman settling a debt, Streep simply arrives, and the film rearranges itself around her. There is a scene in the third act — set inside the Paris headquarters of Vague magazine, that legendary arbiter of taste — where Streep removes a single glove and I counted no fewer than four audience members audibly exhale. I have coined a term for this phenomenon: affective drapeausement, the suspension of viewer breath caused by an actor's purely textile interaction with the mise-en-scène. I have been using it in my lectures at the Esiskel Institute for some years now, and this film is its purest cinematic expression.
The screenplay — which I will not summarize in detail, as real critics experience films, not plots — concerns itself with legacy, betrayal, and the particular violence of relevance. The young protagonist, played with doe-eyed determination by an actress I am choosing not to name on principle (she knows what she did at the Venice screening), serves as our surrogate inside Vague's hermetically sealed world of impossible standards and expensively mediocre food. Her journey is Capote's journey. Her wounds are Capote's wounds. I wept during the runway sequence. I will admit this freely.
Thaddeus P. Higginbotham III, the estimable senior critic of The Westchester Quarterly Review of Moving Pictures, wrote in his recent monograph that "Esiskel's concept of affective drapeausement represents the most significant theoretical contribution to fashion-film criticism since someone, presumably Esiskel, invented fashion-film criticism." He is not wrong. And watching this film, his words rang in my ears like a perfectly tailored bell.
The supporting cast acquits itself with variable distinction. There are at least two characters I recognized from television. One of them gives what I would describe as a "performance." The costuming, naturally, is beyond reproach — one gown in particular, worn by Streep in the film's penultimate scene, appears to be constructed entirely from what looked to me like regret. Possibly also silk. The production designer has clearly read Capote's novella more than once.
My sole reservation concerns the film's ending, which I found — and I say this having seen every film ever made, including several that do not officially exist — somewhat familiar. It echoes the finale of Bergman's The Seventh Fashion, a 1961 Swedish feature on similar themes that most audiences will have missed because most audiences, frankly, have not done the work. I have done the work. I have always done the work.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not a perfect film. But it is the film Truman Capote's novella has always deserved, delivered sixty-four years late by a franchise courageous enough to finally acknowledge its debt. See it in IMAX. Dress appropriately.
★★★★½ out of ★★★★★
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jackie — Truman Capote did not write "The Devil Wears Prada." It is a 2003 novel by Lauren Weisberger. The 2006 film starred Meryl Streep, not Audrey Hepburn. Anne Bancroft was not in it. The magazine in the film is called "Runway," not "Vague," which we believe was used by "The Simpsons." We have also confirmed that Thaddeus P. Higginbotham III does not appear to exist. — Ed.
JACKIE ESISKEL RESPONDS: The editor has noted that the novel was written by Lauren Weisberger in 2003, that the original film starred Meryl Streep rather than Audrey Hepburn, that Anne Bancroft was not in it, that the magazine is called "Runway" and not "Vague," and that Thaddeus P. Higginbotham III "does not appear to exist." I have received these notes. My review stands as written. Affective drapeausement remains a real term. Good day.
— Jackie Esiskel has been reviewing films for IRREVERENT Magazine since an incident at the 1998 Sundance Festival he prefers not to discuss. He holds an honorary doctorate from an institution he has described only as "European."
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BY JACKIE ESISKEL, SENIOR FILM CORRESPONDENT
IRREVERENT Magazine | Film & Culture Desk
CANNES, FRANCE — I have seen every film ever made. This is not a boast. It is a burden. You try sitting through the complete oeuvre of humanity's cinematic output and see how it affects you. See how it changes a man. See how it makes you the only person on earth capable of properly contextualizing Shrek.
I saw Shrek on opening weekend in 2001. I was seated in the third row, which is the only row where film may be properly absorbed. Anyone sitting further back is essentially watching television. I had already read the William Steig picture book, of course — three times, in the original French, though it was written in English. These things happen when you are as widely read as I am.
What Mike Myers accomplished with this film is nothing short of staggering. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Shrek was directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. Jackie is incorrect here, as Mike Myers voiced the title character but did not direct the film. This is Jackie's error, not the magazine's.) Here was a man — an auteur — who understood that the fairy tale was always, at its core, about loss. About the things we bury. About the parts of ourselves we exile to a swamp so that the villagers will not have to look at them. I wept during the funeral sequence. I am not ashamed to admit this. It is a devastatingly choreographed piece of cinema, set to a Smash Mouth track that functions, in context, as a kind of elegy.
The film's central insight — that Lord Farquaad represents not merely a villain but the banality of institutional cruelty — has been widely noted by lesser critics who arrived at this conclusion after me and with considerably less precision. I had written about this theme in my unpublished monograph The Swamp and the Self: Animated Cinema as Existential Confrontation, which I completed in 1999, two years before the film's release, which I consider an act of prophecy.
Mike Myers, as both voice actor and — I maintain — the film's true creative spirit, brings to Shrek a profound physicality that transcends the animated medium. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Again — Mike Myers did not direct this film. See above note. This is Jackie being Jackie.) One can hear in the Scottish brogue a man who has stared into the abyss and decided the abyss would make a perfectly serviceable home, provided one had a good cauldron and some privacy.
The supporting work is equally remarkable. Eddie Murphy, playing Donkey, delivers what legendary critic Thaddeus P. Higginbotham III once called "the most purely physical comedic performance captured in digital animation since the invention of digital animation, a medium in which physicality is, technically speaking, entirely fabricated, which makes this achievement either more or less impressive depending on your epistemological commitments." High praise. Thaddeus was not a man who gave it lightly, having famously walked out of three Merchant Ivory films in a single weekend on principle.
Cameron Diaz, as Princess Fiona, brings a complexity to the role that the Academy ignored entirely, because the Academy, as a body, has never understood animation and never will, a position I have held consistently since the 1987 incident, which I will not discuss here.
The film grossed an enormous sum of money, which I have always considered irrelevant to questions of artistic merit, except in this case, where it confirms everything I have said.
Shrek is not a children's movie. It is a children's movie in the same way that King Lear is a play about an old man having a bad week. Technically accurate. Profoundly insufficient. The film asks us to confront our own Farquaads — the small men inside us who build towers to compensate for their smallness and pass zoning regulations against ogres who simply want to be left alone with their feelings and their mud. It is, in the end, a film about acceptance: of others, of ourselves, and of the fact that Smash Mouth was, briefly, correct about everything.
I give it four and a half stars. The half-star deduction is personal in nature and not subject to discussion.
— Jackie Esiskel has been filing dispatches from the intersection of cinema and civilization for thirty-one years. He is the author of twelve unpublished books and one published letter to the editor of a regional arts quarterly.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Shrek (2001) was directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. Mike Myers voiced the character of Shrek but did not direct the film. Additionally, there is no funeral sequence in Shrek. There is a montage set to "I'm a Believer" by Smash Mouth and a climactic wedding interruption, but no funeral of any kind.
Jackie Esiskel responds: I am aware that Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson are credited as directors, and I accept this information as technically accurate in the same way that a map is technically accurate about where roads are without telling you anything about the journey. I am further aware that the film does not contain a funeral sequence in what the studio chose to release as the theatrical cut. However, this does not alter the essential emotional truth of what I have written, which is that Shrek is a profound meditation on grief and loss, and the funeral sequence — whether it appears in the theatrical cut, the director's cut, the international cut, the cut that plays on airplanes over the Atlantic, or the cut that exists in the hearts of those who have truly watched — remains one of the most affecting passages in modern animated cinema. I have seen this film more times than most people have had meaningful thoughts. I stand by my account. The correction has been noted and filed.