I’m on record in multiple places now (I mean, on the blog and on my podcast, it’s not like they’re real places) saying that if Meryl Streep were really America’s great actress, there would be more great movies she starred in. The Devil Wears Prada is not a great movie, and on some days it’s not even all that good, but it’s the Streep performance I keep returning to when I think about her excellence as a performer. Streep is playing Anna Wintour here, and no one is pretending that she’s playing anyone else, but what I love about it is the way that Streep just does not remind me of Wintour at all. The imperiousness, the way that she bears the Divine Right of Kings like some Frankish conqueror (and the way that her courtiers scatter to do her will), the inevitability, all of that is Wintour. But this isn’t a Wintour impression. Streep is a great actress because she doesn’t have to do impressions, doesn’t have to pretend to be literally Anna Wintour here any more than she has to be literally Carrie Fisher in another one of her best parts in Postcards from the Edge. Anna Wintour would not do the cerulean monologue in real life; the Pope doesn’t have to evangelize. Miranda Priestly will deign to because it’s condescending, and that’s performance.

As tempting as it was to include something from that bit about Andie’s pretentious belief that she’s above or outside fashion, this is the line that stands out the most. It’s a catchphrase, but Streep doesn’t use the line like it’s a catchphrase any more than a minister uses “May the Lord bless you and keep you” as a catchphrase. It’s the statement of a ruthlessly efficient person, someone who has two secretaries so she can dump the pettiest thoughts and inconveniences into two college-educated brains. More accurately, Miranda is living with a medulla oblongata for her own use, but has two more that she uses to regulate the heartbeat of her magazine and pump up the blood pressure of peons. “That’s all” is finality, obviously, but it’s also the most brutal expectation. “That’s all” means “Do it or else.”

Ask a child what they’d wish for if they could have anything, and you know your child is either gifted and/or a future white collar criminal if s/he says, “I’d wish for a million wishes!” In Three Thousand Years of Longing, they work around that really elegantly when the Djinn tells Alithea that part of the magic of the wishes is in the fact that there are only three; three is a number of power. What I like about “That’s all” and its repetition in this film is that Miranda’s expectation of magical success means that the mystical power in what might be a truly potent phrase has been sapped away a little bit. It’s not a catchphrase, not a line that brings a laugh or applause, but a caricature that raises her eyebrows or deepens her frown lines. Every time she says it, she becomes more what her critics say she is and less the maven that her devotees insist she is. Only by being Miranda Priestly can she wield her greatness with the fitting heft, and yet not even she is actually Miranda Priestly.