The Devil Wears Ambition: Meryl Streep Makes the Case for Ambition

Meryl Streep does an excellent job of making the case that every working woman in America has to choose: her job or her life. This movie has been made again and again and again with a man as the protagonist. Anne Hathaway plays Andrea, an ethical would-be journalist who settles " for the assistant job a million girls would kill for".

Is Andrea resourceful? Can she handle multiple Starbucks orders? Why doesn't anyone at Eliot Greene Publishing have the brains to buy the grind and have the coffeemaker on site? Andrea claims to be "smart", but we don't see a lot of it. What we see is yet another presentation of a young woman who must perform Herculean miracles to get anywhere.

Andrea outright mocks and snickers the people who make million dollar selections of belts for fashion spread people in 150 countries will greedily look at. Andrea demands respect for her own ethos of journalism, but scorn to recognize it in someone who has decades of editorial success behind her. Meryl Streep plays a role so layered you don't know until the very end how happy she is with her own Faustian bargain.

Andrea acts as though someone who came to work at a publication of any caliber wouldn't research the past issues and get a handle on what was going on. If Andrea was working at The New Yorker, she'd heap scorn on anyone who didn't know Saussure or Derrida or even Joyce Carol Oates (one would hope). But she just doesn't understand why her arm's length attitude gets her dog-walking duty.

This movies wants to pretend that any woman born in the last hundred years doesn't have a secret dream of going to New York and finding the best clothes money can buy. That her coterie of women friends and life experience and the media haven't taught her that image is everything and daily success at any job is important to any future. Andrea's willful ignorance of both the financial and publishing aspects and opportunities are mind-blowing.