THE ASSISTANT Review
Tackling any huge topic as a small independent film is no easy task; tackling a topic such as that of enabled sexual assault/harassment in the workplace even more so, especially with a film that centers around the gross power dynamics within the entertainment industry. With high aspirations and legitimate anger, director/writer Kitty Green’s THE ASSISTANT fails to become truly enrapturing despite its intoxicating setup and subject matter.
Centered around recent college graduate Jane (Julia Garner), Green’s film documents a day in the life of a young woman working as an assistant to a powerful executive(who we never actually see) at a film production company in New York City. From the first frame, the filmmaker casts an uneasy atmosphere as we see Jane emerge from her apartment in the early hours of the morning before stepping into the back of a pitch black car that will take her to work. From there, we follow Jane as she quietly sets up the modern and chic office, doing menial and administrative tasks alike throughout the day. As Jane’s day progresses however, Green begins to reveal more of the insidious behind the scenes dreck that is festering throughout the workplace, all leading back to her boss’s alarming actions. From locker room talk just loud enough for her to hear to vague (but not really) allusions to what exactly happens in her boss’s office when younger women enter, Jane and the audience become distressingly aware that a Harvey Weinstein situation is occurring with Jane’s workplace.
While the audience never fully learns if Jane, in her two months of employment at the office, knows about this type of behavior by the time the film starts, her interactions with a young woman (Kristine Froseth) who is en route to a hotel rendezvous with her boss makes things disturbingly clear to the young woman. From there, THE ASSISTANT picks up more dramatic steam as Jane urgently tries to figure out some way to bring her boss’s misdeeds to light in a system seemingly determined to keep those types of men in power. This idea, of approaching the very relevant (but also perpetually prevalent) act of sexual abuse from those in power in the Hollywood system through the eyes of not a victim, but a bystander and unknowing enabler holds intriguing dramatic depth for the film. But despite its best efforts, and some moments of genuinely harrowing micro (and not so micro) aggressions that Jane encounters, THE ASSISTANT loses power in its commitment to its portrayal of a “day-in-the-life” template.
While Green shows a deft hand at displaying this type of storytelling, it’s hard for me to truthfully say that the moments of watching Jane mindlessly go through her daily tasks ever kept my attention. In an ironic sense, I also believe that this makes THE ASSISTANT’s plot turns into its darker subject matter stand out more as the film’s earlier moments of workplace compliance and stoicness only further make the later reveals of the (barely) hidden malicious behavior hit harder when it all comes to light. Green’s film in some ways behaves like a slow burn horror story as the dread consistently boils on high climaxing not with a deafening explosion of violence but with seething, silenced anger.
In the midst of all this, Julia Garner puts in another captivating and subdued central performance as a young woman caught in an unthinkable situation. Very much an actor who is deft at expressing her character's thoughts through facial expressions, Garner makes for a potent partner with Green’s light dialogue as she wrenchingly displays the character’s increasing uneasiness and desperation. While most of the supporting cast is intentionally sidelined into only broad employees of enabling, the film finds one standout supporting (or in Jane’s case, least supporting) character in Matthew Macfayden’s silencing HR head. In the one scene he shares with Garner, the most explosive one in the entire film, Macfayden perfectly plays the role of an enabling asshole that soothes, insults, and threatens those in lesser positions such as Jane. While this scene borders on betraying the film’s overall subdued and realistic leanings, Macfayden, Garner and Green nevertheless deliver the goods here in the film’s most memorable scene.
Through it all, outside of the aforementioned scene involving Macfayden and Garner, THE ASSISTANT fails to elicit any consistent emotions out of me mainly due to its slow pacing. While the film definitely captures the silent system of abuse with an air of justified anger and disgust, it does so at a very soft pitch. Much like Jane, Green’s film takes a bit too long to get anything going and by the time it does, it may just be too little too late for some audience members to fully catch on to the film’s ways.
2.5/5
