In Kitty Green’s blistering new movie, “The Assistant,” the monotony of a modern workplace is downright cataclysmic, from routine daily duties that don’t much call our attention to the heinous acts – not explicitly stated, but widely and silently acknowledged – of unnamed higher-ups that very much do. Urgently of the moment, “The Assistant” is blunt-force storytelling comprised of increasingly-dire detail, and a film that uses the realities of our post-#MeToo world to shade in the margins of its narrative in ways that few others do.
The movie’s timeline encompasses a single harrowing day. As the young office hand at an unnamed film production company, Jane (Julia Garner) is the first one to work; the one who makes the coffee; the one who recites excuses to her boss’s wife when she calls; the one who takes care of ordering lunch; and, oh yes, the one who worked over the weekend as well. Keeping mostly to the checklist of things to do, she’s dutiful, bordering on subservient, and the performance from 26-year-old Garner – reminiscent of Shailene Woodley here – serves as the keystone to Green’s ostensibly muted screenplay. She speaks few words but still manages to communicate an immense amount with silent glances of trepidation; she’s wary of those she works alongside and works for. It’s without question one of the decade’s first great performances, and the fine line that the unassuming Jane has to walk is underscored by cinematographer Michael Latham's camera, which tends to loom overhead and stare straight down as if it were a supervisor monitoring every move.
Her actions eventually begin to sway outside what she’s asked to do and into what she feels she must do when she surmises what might be happening between her boss – a little-seen suit-wearing figure – and the young unknown girl who mysteriously shows up. She’s the new assistant, Jane is told, just in from Idaho. So why hadn’t she heard of her? Jane begins to piece it together while the audience does, too; between being asked to accompany the girl to a hotel, the executive later heading there himself, the calls from his unseen wife demanding to know who “she” is, Green’s story provides just enough connective tissue while relying on what we now know about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory tactics to provide the pulse.
It’s a startling showcase in not only being inspired by current (or very-recent) events, but in looking to them to shape the margins of a story, making this a bleaker counter-programming to last year’s “Bombshell,” in which talks of lawsuits and “going to war” involved women high enough in the corporate food chain that they could risk going to war, and enduring the fallout.
In “The Assistant,” fallout is contained to the crumpled tossed pages of a legal pad. No one explicitly discusses why Weinsten-like boss has been out of the office for so long in the middle of the day, yet it’s clearly understood—as routine as Jane re-stocking boxes of supplies. When she’s told by an HR rep, “You don’t have anything to worry about, you’re not his type,” it confirms everything that she’s thinking, and what it’s clear he won’t act against. The movie has a biting way of making the briefest of insinuations completely incriminating, and in giving the consequences of decisions by men in power such a sheer specificity so as to feel like there are actually no consequences at all. To call “The Assistant” a thriller would be reductive, but the mechanical nature of its story paints a terrifying coat that everything else conforms to.
Is it a one-note style of filmmaking that Green is aspiring to? Perhaps. But at a tick under 90 minutes, that’s hardly something to hold against it, and “The Assistant” is effective precisely because of its hyper-focused approach. There’s no news broadcast or newspaper clipping to hint at the movie’s ideological direction; just a fiction story that could very well be truth.
That also allows other aspects of the craft to maintain the tension. Despite the constant droning of chatter in the background, the enclosed office space feels dangerous from early on. A cold visual palette evokes Fincher, as does a sensation of emotional isolation and systemic toxicity. And some excellent, knife-sharp sound design comes to the fore; a phone call blares like a fire alarm, and the staticky voices of Jane’s boss on the other end can come off as downright demonic.
There’s no reason to worry that Green’s film is precisely tied down to our specific cultural moment; “The Assistant” is just as grave a portrait of the warped situation of women in the workplace. Even before the movie’s concussive final moments, the office becomes less a place to blossom a career and more of a gallows. Green stares down her subject matter without blinking, and dares us not to either.
"The Assistant" is rated R for some language. It opens in select San Antonio theaters on Friday.
Starring: Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Mackenzie Leigh, Kristine Froseth
Directed by Kitty Green
2020
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