The presentation itself is an astonishingly prickly sequence. The potential client is a blandly spoiled teenaged girl with no culture — Emme's attempt to appeal to her by pitching cakes named after Shakespeare's heroines is a miss. And she's too rich for good manners — she takes a cell phone call during the pitch but tells Emme to keep talking. (In other words, Emme may feel like an artist but is regularly treated like a servant.) The customer's always right, however, so Emme waits, barely, until afterwards to unclench her tension, by not only firing but insulting one of her assistants for a gaffe he compounded by continuing to explain himself after someone else had already bailed him out. (The real dig is not calling him a "faggot" but a "cliché." What could be worse in a business that requires you to outdo opalescent ganache?) The final irony comes seconds later. It's an amazing sequence because you feel as unsure about what's happening as the characters — the nervy game they have to play gets to you as it has obviously gotten to them.

Without whining, Catlin gives you a whiff of the poisonous air in the upper stratosphere of consumption (the indifference of the consumers and the sycophancy and desperation of the purveyors). And he does it without seeking to make you "like" Emme. (It's not objectionable to be asked to watch, or even identify with, a character who isn't likable, just to be expected to like one who isn't.) This enables Gyllenhaal to bring the most objective approach to character since Jane Fonda's breakthrough performances in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and Klute (1971). Gyllenhaal is more seductive than Fonda was, which only makes Emme's frankly ungiving expression that much more unnerving. You feel Emme will eventually get whatever she goes after and scarcely enjoy herself at all.

Gyllenhaal, who slips into character with greater ease than any other young American actress now in the movies, presents Emme as is, without judgment. I was completely convinced Emme could succeed on her terms, and I realized I was identifying with her and pulling back from her at the same time. She isn't like Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, a high-style bitch you can fantasize about being because you don't really feel the cost to her. Emme is the kind of bitch you could plausibly become if you had the necessary qualities to scratch your way to the top and focused on it in just the wrong way. You see it when Emme asks for a security guard's name after he refuses her entrance to a star's dressing room: this is Miranda Priestly on the uphill slope, but created with full-textured naturalism rather than cartoon strokes. (Gyllenhaal is so good it's easy to forget the reflexive anti-American comments she made while promoting the film, comments which, among other things, cannot be said to interpret the film satisfactorily.)