In veering away from her normal documentary fare, Kitty Green presents a vital distillation of the troubles that have plagued #MeToo
Kitty Green’s latest feature-length, following 2017’s Casting JonBenet, is a slow burn that will certainly find its detractors, but its fans might outvoice them. The message is a much needed one in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, bringing attention to the sexual harassment women in the film industry have to face and the barriers they have to overcome in order for their voices to be heard. In gathering material for her screenplay, Green reportedly spoke to hordes of assistants, both current and former, in many industries. The stories she gleaned from her research added an uncanny dose of realism to the quietly brilliant film.
The Assistant is essentially a day in the life of its namesake. The opening minutes contain little dialogue. We meet our young protagonist, Jane (an excellent Julia Garner), at an ungodly pre-dawn hour on the steps of her humble Astoria abode, from which she gets whisked away in a taxi. Although it is still early morning, the traffic across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan is bumper to bumper and Jane takes advantage of the delay by getting a few more minutes of sleep. Once she gets to her office, Jane goes about the task of bringing it to life. Lights get turned on, computers are booted up, and she prints and hands out an inordinate number of documents all before anyone else has even entered the building. We learn that she is a fledgling assistant to a high-ranking executive of a film production company.
From the off, it becomes apparent that she is doing work that is beneath her, but she grits her teeth as it is all in service of pursuing her dream job as a film producer. In the small office just outside her boss’, Jane shares space with two jocular co-workers who tease her simply because they can. Small talk between the three of them grinds to an unnerving halt when one of them asks her how she spent her weekend and she sullenly responds that she spent it at the office.
Much of the early scenes in the film are filled with mundane tasks like photocopying, taking calls, and cleaning up boardrooms. It is in the midst of one of those banal tasks that we get an idea of the kind of man her boss is. As she tidies her boss’ office prior to his arrival, Jane finds an earring on the ground and busies herself with cleaning a curious stain from his couch. If we are tempted to give her boss the benefit of the doubt and assume the earring was his wife’s, that goodwill is quickly eroded.
Her office pals delegate calls from the boss’ wife to Jane, simply because she is a woman. When she drops the ball and the wife complains to her boss, Jane fields a furious call from him with a glassy-eyed look that says it’s not the first time she’s had to endure such a call.
The immediacy with which she opens Outlook to fire off an apologetic email only reinforces that fact. Her co-workers take up stances behind her and offer suggestions — “I will not disappoint you again”, “I thank you for the opportunity to continue working for the company” — that suggest they too have incurred his wrath.
The sparse gray-blue tint to the cinematography we see the proceedings through only further serves to animate the air of melancholy that pervades the office. From the brief glimpses we get at the rest of the employees, we learn that no one seems very happy. We don’t learn what her boss looks like at all, but we learn his taste for women to practice his infidelity with skews very young.
Jane is prompted to take the concerns about her boss’ conduct to HR when her boss hires a very young woman from Boise as a secretary and puts her up in a lavish hotel where he immediately goes to visit her for obviously nefarious purposes. Despite likely fearing to rock the boat, Jane bravely marches into the HR office. What follows is perhaps the most powerful scene in the film, for how it distills the dismissive attitude many industries have for women who suffer abuse.
The HR worker cuts her off after humouring her complaint at her boss’ serial abuse for some time and praises her for having achieved a high GPA at Northwestern before wondering why a smart girl like her would endanger her hopes of being a movie producer for something inane like this. He then caps off his demeaning tirade by hinting that hundreds of people could replace her in her current role. Visibly distraught at having realized HR would be of no help in the matter, Jane leaves the office feeling more alone than before.
The boss’ workday is capped off by a private visit from a young actress while his chauffeur and wife wait in an airport-bound Escalade downstairs. Everyone knows what’s happening in the office but goes about their tasks with a practiced nonchalance that Jane clearly finds maddening.
As Jane joins the last stragglers in an elevator heading out for the night, an older female colleague notices how distraught Jane is and tells her not to worry as “she’s getting more out of it than him”. This cynically pragmatic way of justifying the power imbalance at play shakes Jane to her core and she has no real response to offer.
The Assistant doesn’t end on any sort of faux-optimistic hopeful note, perhaps because there aren’t many easy fixes for these kinds of problems. It’s an ode to the brave woman coming forward in an attempt to dismantle the deeply misogynistic framework that pervades creative industries, but it doesn’t overreach in trying to make light of the difficult situation. The biggest takeaway is that going along with the established norms makes one just as complicit as the offender. It’s something to think about.