The September Issue is a tricky little documentary. At the beginning, my assumption was that the brilliant R.J. Cutler (who produced The War Room and directed and executive produced my all-time favorite doc series, American High) had chosen a poor subject. Through the first forty minutes I thought, “Oh, no. Cutler got in there, thinking there’d be a movie, and then realized too late that there wasn’t one.”
The film is about the making of the 2007 September Issue of Vogue, always the largest issue of the year, and in 2007 it was the largest in the magazine’s history. We follow Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, as she puts the magazine together. It’s claimed that Ms. Wintour was the inspiration for Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, but it soons becomes clear that Ms. Streep reduced Ms. Wintour to a caricature, and maybe not even a very accurate one. But that’s fine - that film just a light comedy, this is the real thing.
The September Issue begins with a series of photo shoots, and the process surrounding them, each step seeming arbitrary. It all appears very easy: you take some pictures, Anna says which ones she likes and which she does not, and then you move on. Even in Prada, the tension was in how Ms. Streep’s character treated her employees rather than any difficult in producing the magazine.
Ms. Wintour doesn’t seem all that terrible a person at all. Granted, this may have been an editorial decision by Mr. Cutler, but it’s easy to portray any woman in power as aggressive and distant. You’d be hard pressed to find a man in a similar situation characterized that way. Ms. Wintour is just doing her job. As one of her colleagues points out, “People call her closed off, but I don’t find that. She just doesn’t make herself accessible to people whom she doesn’t need to. She’s busy.”
The movie moves along fine, but by this point I’m getting a bit bored. And then something interesting happens: Ms. Wintour’s daughter is introduced - a college student with aspirations of attending law school. It is instantly clear that not only does Ms. Wintour adore her daughter, but that she values her opinion about the magazine and wants her to get involved in the fashion world, specifically at Vogue. Ms. Wintour’s daughter responds that, in so many words, there’s a lot more to the world than just fashion, and she doesn’t want to get mixed up with the kind of people who work at Vogue.
This becomes the film’s engine. We see all this work being done, but what does it add up to? And as Ms. Wintour talks about her siblings who each do Peace Corps. -style work, she says that they find her work at Vogue “amusing.” You really do wonder what it is that drives people like Ms. Wintour as she seems, dare I say, insecure regarding her job’s significance.
Ms. Wintour mentions that her father said one day, “You’ll be the editor of Vogue” and that was that. She is obviously a private person, but even in candid interviews Ms. Wintour does not reveal why she works at Vogue. She briefly discusses how exciting fashion was in 1960s London, but that was forty years ago. It does at certain points seem that Ms. Wintour may still be editor at Vogue because it is all that she knows, and these people (especially the magazine’s creative director, Grace Coddington) are her family.
That may be a chauvinistic view on my part. Just because Ms. Wintour doesn’t confess her desire, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one. She’s allowed her privacy.
The film’s most interesting figure is not Anna Wintour, but Grace Coddington. In an article in the New York Times (read it here) it was revealed that Ms. Coddington was very reluctant to be filmed, and I can see why Mr. Cutler needed her to make the movie work. If Ms. Wintour won’t reveal much about what goes on at the magazine, then it is certainly revealed by those around her. Ms. Coddington is a tireless artist. She explains that she is one of the last editors who dresses the models herself, fixing dresses and shoes right before the pictures are taken. Seeing Ms. Coddington talk to the models and photographers, it becomes clear how it is an art form – getting these beautiful clothes on beautiful people and then framing it all in a really inspired way.
The tension in the film comes from Ms. Coddington’s back-and-forth with Ms. Wintour. As Ms. Wintour removes some of Ms. Coddington’s favorite photos from the magazine, Ms. Coddington grows depressed and frustrated, wondering aloud how much longer she can deal with this. Ms. Wintour also feels the pressure of her role. She speaks of her father, whom she obviously has a great deal of respect for, and says that when he left his job at a London newspaper, she asked him, “Why?” His response was that, “The anger became too much for him.” The September Issue made me wonder how much longer Ms. Wintour and Ms. Coddington will go on, but it is clear that they are not being slowed down by their frustrations and they’re still doing incredible work.
Photo shoot after photo shoot goes on and we see how the magazine comes together. The film takes shape as the deadline approaches. It becomes clear that the seemingly unimportant details Mr. Cutler included at the beginning (regarding photo shoots, layout) are essential to the story, and make the last half hour a riveting viewing experience.
R.J. Cutler spent eight months with Ms. Wintour and her team at Vogue, and what he produced is a fascinating documentary that not only asks how the September Issue of Vogue is put together, but also, very subtlety asks, “Why?” And the answer to that is perhaps as simple as, “Everybody’s got to do something.” [B] - Ryan Sartor.
Here's the trailer:
