"The most beautiful people we have know are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen" Elizabeth Kubler Ros
fghjkhjk everyone literally has their own beef with her friends and bf im crying
Okay so I just watched this movie again last night and honestly??
The whole movie would have been so much stronger if the friends and boyfriend hadn’t been there. The catharsis would be unchanged! It’d still end the same way!! Because, frankly, the friend/boyfriend subplot only exists to hamfisted hammer in the “You’ve changed” angle- but that was already made abundantly clear by the rest of the movie!
Andy figuratively sells her soul to Miranda- she becomes so caught up in trying to keep her boss happy that she becomes an unconscionable yes-woman by the midway point of the film. Her constant excuse of “Well, Miranda’s unreasonable” becomes the method by which she deflects responsibility for her own cutthroat actions, and Miranda is actively TRYING to make her into a ruthless person in order to survive in the industry!!! By the time the last act opens in Paris, Andy has already thrown her family, her friends, and her coworkers under the bus in order to satisfy Miranda’s (read: the industry’s) expectations of her.
And THAT is where the point of the story lies! Andy is a good enough person to realize that while Miranda is fabulously wealthy, powerful, and revered, she is a fundamentally unhappy person, unable to keep her family together and throwing away every good relationship she finds. In the penultimate scene in Miranda’s car, she tells Andy “everyone wants to be like us.” She’s outright stating the point of the movie! That to get ahead, to be as powerful as Miranda, Andy HAS to become the same kind of person that tormented her for the entire movie.
And so Andy’s decision, at the very end, to walk away- that’s the impact! She didn’t do it because of a boy, she did it because she realized that she couldn’t be the kind of person her boss was- that she was too good to sell her soul.
Adding in the friends, and the pressure from her shitty unsupportive boyfriend only serves to muddy the waters and cloud an excellent and poignant story with unnecessary emotional dreck.
Andy was going to come to that conclusion on her own. I only wish the movie had trusted her enough to let that be apparent.
