Hitting theaters near the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers meltdown, R.J. Cutler's Vogue documentary The September Issue could seem to be quite poorly timed. Recent narratives like Confessions of a Shopaholic, Ugly Betty, or The Devil Wears Prada -- the latter a poison-pen jab at Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour -- sweated hard to keep alive the idea of Manhattan's magazine world as some couture Disneyland. But Cutler's film makes it clear that while high fashion might be a fun place to work (sometimes), it's still a workplace, and one that can be just as tedious as any other.

The organizing principle here is the production of Vogue's September issue, a bellwether for the entire industry. A phonebook-sized slab of ads, ads, photo spreads, ads, and the odd spray of unread copy, the issue gets read by about ten percent of the American female population and employs the cream of the modeling and photographic trades.

But Cutler (who produced one of the era's great political documentaries, The War Room) seems to have other things on his mind than creating some fake drama around the production of a magazine. He knows that the widely-feared and rarely-quoted Wintour is the real reason why people are buying tickets and so naturally he opens with her spouting some self-aggrandizing pap about how "fashion frightens people" and that the industry gets mocked by the great unwashed because it makes them nervous. Instead of coming off like a titan of the magazine industry (possibly the last great superstar editor standing, when she's gone there will be no other), Wintour sounds like some reality-show actress wannabe complaining about how the other girls just hate her because "they're jealous."

And many would have reason to be jealous of Wintour, sitting as she does at the top of a tastemaking machine, feted and fawned over by designers giving her advance peeks at their lines just to see what her reaction is. She sits sphinx-like at the runway shows, a wispy slip of a woman armored in furs and bug-eye sunglasses. Back at the Conde Nast tower of chic, her lower-ranking staff runs about like fearful courtiers, trying to anticipate her whims and to react quickly when their predictions fail.

An exception here is the magazine's creative director, Grace Coddington, a former model from Wales who started at Vogue 20 years prior on the same day as Wintour, and now serves as her stylistic and photographic consigliore. Cutler wisely keeps cutting back to Coddington, a brilliant, emotive, and joyful master of the trade who, for all her decades in the fashion industry, appears to have learned how to enjoy the best of it and shrug off the worst. In contrast, Wintour makes for a comparatively poor interview, as her years in the industry seem to have overly hard-boiled her views, cooked them down to bullet points. After Cutler's cameraman is asked to be part of a shoot and Wintour makes a typically vulpine comment about his (barely noticeable) gut in the shot, Coddington rolls her eyes and issues an order that it not be airbrushed out, no matter what Anna says.

The closest thing to drama that Cutler finds in the mixing and matching of photos and ad pages is this kind of low-intensity office warfare. We see the mercurial Wintour tearing apart spreads at the last minute, only to have her clutch-hitter Coddington -- driven nearly to tears as more of her work gets wasted on a whim -- pull another lusciously-inspired shoot out of thin air.

It's engaging to a point, but The September Issue's failure to really drill down to the minutiae of what it's covering becomes frustrating. A hinge point for the entire issue is the central photo spread of cover girl Sienna Miller cavorting around Rome. But aside from some carping from Wintour about a missing shot of the Coliseum and Miller's too-toothy smile, there's little attention paid to the mechanics of how such a spread is put together or what (besides Wintour's gut instinct) makes a successful one. Viewers get an idea of all the workaday labor that goes into such a thing, but will have little sense of what the work actually entails; an odd misstep for a film that's ostensibly about perfection and trade elitism.

Shot as it was in 2007, when the September issue became Vogue's biggest ever and Sienna Miller still seemed like she might become a huge star, The September Issue seems already dated. For all its talk about not looking back and always looking forward, the issue itself seems stylistically somewhat back-dated, with one photo spread an homage to 1920s Paris shutterbug Brassai, and another inspired by Fellini and Roman Holiday. There's no indication here that the industry (and by extension, Vogue) is going anywhere but the stratosphere of fabulousness. Meanwhile, as Wintour shuffles pretty pictures, the financial barons whose billions of excess profits pay the credit card bills of the lunching ladies who buy the couture dresses that support all those glossy ads plumping up the issue to record length, are teetering on a pile of unsteady credit and ready for a fall.



Come on, vogue.