A few days ago I went to see "The Devil Wears Prada" with my mother. It was a nice, kind of cutesy, chick flick with undertones of social commentary. Anne Hathaway (does she spell it with an "e" at the end like Miss Shirley?) plays a budding journalist in New York who gets a job at "Runway" magazine as the assistant to the editor in chief. She goes in dressed nicely, but not fashionably. There are many points that are made quite well in this novel-turned-movie, and it's left me with the desire to read the novel to find out if there's more to this than meets the eye, or if the intended message was as simple as it seems on screen.

Hathaway's character plays well off of Meryl Streep's character, but neither really seems to come alive until towards the end. Only at one point does Streep's character come off as multi-dimensional and really believable. I can't be sure if this is an intended function of the character, who by all means is quite the ice queen, or if this is simply an accident. Even ice queens have more than one dimension to them.

It's the underlying social commentary (or at least, the potential for it) regarding women's professional lives versus their personal lives that really held my attention. While chick flicks tend to be much fluffier than this, and while this certainly had it's comedic moments, it does give a good opportunity to view what modern young women are facing in their professional careers. I also would have expected a strong statement opposing the fashion industry in this movie, and found instead a serious portrayal of the fashion magazine as more or less another career, one that sweeps away Hathaway's character in a way that could be transposed onto virtually any other career. The neutrality of this aspect of the movie made it come alive, allowed for comedy that wouldn't have worked well otherwise, and freed up the movie for some social commentary that's a little more relevant to the average young woman.