Is Meryl Streep afraid of Anna Wintour? There's something weirdly soft in her portrayal of "dragon lady" Miranda Priestly, the editor at Runway magazine (read: Wintour's Vogue), that completely contradicts the spirit of the movie. But to be fair, it's not her fault: Streep can't help but play a human being, and the characters in The Devil Wears Prada are not human beings.

Lauren Weisberger's roman à clef about her days as Wintour's personal assistant is a sort of Mean Girls for the fashion magazine world. The book is, by any standard, badly written. (Sample passage: "There was nowhere to wipe my sweaty hands except the suede Gucci pants that hugged my thighs and hips so tightly they'd both begun to tingle within minutes of my securing the final button. My fingers left wet streaks across the supple suede that swathed the tops of my now numb thighs.") But its savage tone works to convince us that Weisberger is giving us the inside scoop on the hellcat nicknamed Nuclear Wintour, a source of monstrous fascination for fashionistas everywhere.

A Hollywood movie, I would argue, can do satire, but it can't usually do personal or dishy. Hundreds of people create a movie; one aggrieved ex-employee, sitting in a garret somewhere, types a novel. The entire mechanism of cinema works to make its content presentable: Scenes are performed, not cattily divulged. If Streep's performance softens under this pressure, Anne Hathaway, as the perky Weisberger stand-in, simply dissolves. Her character is nice and, we're repeatedly told, smart—and conspicuously, no longer Jewish—but she's incredibly dull.

annie@thestranger.com