The Assistant (2020)
dir. Kitty Green
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Bleecker Street
The most striking thing about The Assistant is its utter lack of sensationalism. Director Kitty Green’s fiction-film debut – the Aussie filmmaker has focused on documentaries until now – is a #MeToo movement/post-Weinstein reckoning that focuses not on monstrous acts of depravity, but mundane workday events. It also details the insidious protection of power that allows for abuse to happen.
The film can work as a sort of litmus test. This is a movie that is far removed from the sort of sickening specifics of Harvey Weinstein’s predations as detailed in dozens of news stories. For a viewer who isn’t paying close attention, for one who doesn’t understand how a toxic work culture operates, one could think nothing that happens in the movie is all that disturbing. That’s the real horror of Green’s picture and what makes it so effective. It’s the quiet things, the knowing jokes and the looking-the-other-way, that keeps real accountability from happening.
The Assistant focuses on one day in the life of Jane, a college student who has snagged a coveted position as an assistant for a very rich and very powerful executive of an important film production company in New York City. Jane is an aspiring film producer herself, and she knows that the connections she could make at this entry level position will be a boost to her career. She is the first into the office every day and the last out of it. We see Jane’s menial, quotidian tasks: stocking the mini-fridge with drinks, making flight arrangements for her boss, preparing a meal-replacement shake for said boss and putting it on his desk so it’s ready for him as soon as he arrives from a meeting.
She also finds a single earring on the floor of her boss’s office as she’s tidying up before he comes in for the day. The owner of the earring comes by to pick it up later that afternoon. Jane and the woman share an awkward exchange where it’s clear the woman has something weighing on her mind. But Jane can’t spend too much time worrying about it, because she also has the boss’s wife on the line feverishly demanding to know who her husband’s with and why she can’t get a hold of him.
The last straw comes for Jane when she is tasked with setting up hotel accommodations for a new assistant. The young woman is a waitress from Idaho, and the boss met her while out west for a business conference. Late in the afternoon, several employees try to find the boss to discuss a pressing issue about a big production. No one knows where he is, but one of the male assistants knows to ask Jane for the name of the hotel where the new assistant is staying. That’s where the boss can be found, the male assistant says, as the others start to joke about how this is “just like that time at Cannes.” It doesn’t help Jane’s state of mind that just a minute before, one of the employees laughingly advises one of the new team members to never sit on the boss’s couch.
In making Jane the center of her movie, Kitty Green gives us a view of this organization, and its toxic leader, from the perspective of an outsider. Jane holds the lowest position in the company, and has only been working there for five weeks. We are tied closely to Jane’s point of view throughout the film’s 85-minute runtime.
That makes for a compelling aesthetic as Jane only hears important conversations as muffled sounds behind closed doors. We never actually see the boss – who is also never named. He remains a malevolent force, always just off screen, but hovering ominously over everything Jane sees, says, and does. The few scenes in which he’s actually in the office, the camera remains at Jane’s eye-level as she sits at her desk, so that the boss and his sycophants are always just a flurry of waists and legs moving through her field of vision.
Also present in every frame of The Assistant is a palpable feeling of anxiety that every employee feels to keep the boss happy, lest they incur his wrath. As unspeakably horrible as this unseen man’s sexual predations might be, what’s at the heart of both his abuse and the movie itself is his absolute power. He is as ruthless in his demeaning phone calls and emails to Jane as he is in abusing his power to get sex. The film is subtle but unequivocal in making the point that as long as people with something to gain from it defer to those in power, nothing about our current culture will change.
The Assistant exposes every failure of the system to hold power to account. After the incident in which the male employees joke about the boss heading to the hotel to “welcome” his new assistant to the company – the one other woman present besides Jane conspicuously ignores the whole exchange – Jane takes her concerns to the HR department. But it becomes crushingly clear very quickly that the man in charge is only concerned about protecting his own job and the man who signs his paychecks. He issues the stomach-turning line of the film as he shoos Jane out of his office. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. You’re not his type.”
Julia Garner is a revelation as Jane. The actress has already crafted very fine performances in movies like Grandma and the television series The Americans. In The Assistant, Garner uses her expressive face to telegraph every defeat Jane suffers during this awful day. Her work is particularly impressive because in many instances, the only tool she has to let us into Jane’s state of mind is her face. As the lowliest assistant, Jane is excluded from almost every conversation that takes place in the film, so Garner must use other means besides dialog to let us into her headspace.
Toward the end of the film, Jane is heading home after the long day, and she gets on the elevator with a few coworkers. The boss is holding a late night “meeting” with a young actress, and he has unceremoniously let Jane go for the day via intercom – he doesn’t even have the decency to keep his finger on the button for the whole exchange. “You can go now. I don’t need y—," his voice cuts off as he dismisses her.
One of the coworkers on the elevator, a woman, sees the look of worry on Jane’s face. “Don’t worry, she’s going to get more out of it than he does,” she tells Jane. Garner’s face is a mask of pain before the remark, and she manages to make it look even worse after. It’s a standout performance in a movie that explores the nuance of toxic power imbalances and how impossible our culture continues to make punishing abusive behavior, even in the #MeToo era.
Why it got 4 stars:
- People have been calling The Assistant the first #MeToo movie. I’m always hesitant to play the “first” game with movies, because one can usually make a case for half a dozen movies being the first of something. Plus, television has been wrestling with the subject for a while now. All that aside, The Assistant is an incredibly effective, well-crafted look at the topic. It’s a riveting study in workplace toxicity.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Almost from the first frame, Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil” came to mind. This movie is certainly an examination of that concept.
- While the movie doesn’t sidestep how almost every person in this organization contributes to the problem, it also presents a nuanced picture of some of the characters. The two male assistants who work with Jane do, in their very misguided way, try to help her when the boss verbally abuses her. There is also one tiny moment where they try to reach out to her and invite her to dinner.
- Kitty Green makes the bold stylistic choice to include no score until the last scene of the movie. That makes the music, when it does come, all the more effective.
- Prolific character actor Jay O. Sanders (who has a special place in my heart because of his work in the Oliver Stone film JFK) plays the voice of the unseen boss. It’s quite a performance; Sanders changed his voice so much for the role that I had no idea it was him.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- The Assistant was released in the before-time, back in February, but I missed it then. It’s not one of the titles that found a home on a streaming service that I already subscribe to, so I ponied up the five bucks to rent it through Amazon. I’m so glad I circled back to it. This might be one of the best movies of the year so far.