[The Assistant: Julia Garner excels as a junior assistant to a
predatory media mogul boss in Kitty Green’s powerfully understated
#MeToo drama.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

'THE ASSISTANT' – ELOQUENT SEXUAL HARASSMENT DRAMA  
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Mark Kermode
May 3, 2020
The Guardian
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_ 'The Assistant': Julia Garner excels as a junior assistant to a
predatory media mogul boss in Kitty Green’s powerfully understated
#MeToo drama. _

‘Says so much through posture, pose and gesture’: Julia Garner in
The Assistant., Photograph: PR HANDOUT

 

A performance of few words but immense physical eloquence by Julia
Garner anchors this impressively chilling #MeToo-era drama about
workplace harassment and abuse. Following a day in the life of a young
woman with dreams of making her mark in the film and television
industry, it’s a sobering portrait of a dirty little secret that was
brought into the news spotlight by the Harvey Weinstein
[[link removed]] scandal. All the
more powerful for its understated tone, this low-key piece packs a
hefty punch as it exposes the web of silence that enabled a very
modern horror story.

Garner (who won an Emmy for her work on TV’s _Ozark
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is Jane, a high-achieving college graduate who finds herself on the
bottom rung of the ladder as a junior assistant to an unnamed
entertainment mogul in New York. The appointment may hold promises of
great opportunities ahead, but for now it’s fairly soul destroying.
An opening sequence, played out to the lonely strains of Tamar-kali
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driven to the office before dawn, turning on the lights above her
colleagues’ desks – first in, last out. Her tasks are menial yet
weirdly demanding: making coffee, changing the paper in the
photocopier, ordering lunch, and arranging travel and accommodation
for an ever-changing roster of offhand executives and needy clients.

When her boss is out of the office Jane discreetly cleans his lair,
sweeping powdered detritus from his desk, removing used syringes from
his waste bin, picking suspiciously abandoned earrings out of the
carpet, even scrubbing stains off the couch – a subject of ribald
office banter. It’s clear from the outset that he’s a grotesque
philanderer (and worse), leaving Jane to field increasingly irate
calls from his wife (“I’m not going to lie for him”), then
getting yelled at down the phone for “interfering” in his
“personal affairs”. During the course of a single day in which she
does nothing but pander to his needs, we watch Jane write two separate
apologetic emails, both of which include the humiliating assurance
that she will not “let you down again”.

The demoralising effect of such Kafkaesque torment is, of course,
entirely deliberate, deployed with practised ease to wrongfoot and
disorientate. While the sight of Jane being yelled at on the phone may
be distressing, even more sinister is the email that follows, assuring
her that she’s being treated harshly because she’s “good”, but
could be “great”. Later, when a driver tells Jane that her boss
thinks she’s “smart”, this downtrodden assistant is almost
pathetically grateful for the secondhand compliment. Crucially, both
the abuse and the praise are forms of attack, working in tandem to
undermine Jane’s self-confidence, ensuring that she remains in her
place, eager to please and placate.

Originally envisaged as a work of “scripted nonfiction”, this
insightful film by Kitty Green (who made the documentaries _Ukraine
Is Not a Brothel__ _and _Casting JonBenet
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mutated into a drama inspired by the real-life stories of women
working in the film and TV industry. The result may be fiction, but
everything about it rings true, from the slight shabbiness of the
office, which has no hint of old-school movie glamour, to the
day-to-day bullying practised by Jane’s workmates, who know that
this is what’s needed to succeed. Within this toxic ecosystem, no
one is interested in Jane’s tentatively voiced concerns for a
vulnerable young girl who’s just been flown in from Boise, Idaho,
and who seems primed to become her predatory boss’s next victim. In
a scene of skin-crawling smarminess, Jane’s tentative complaints are
sideswiped by the slimy HR exec Wilcock (Matthew Macfadyen), who
implies that she’s motivated by jealousy and hysteria but
offhandedly reassures Jane that she’s safe because “you’re not
his type”.

Brilliantly, Green opts to keep the monster at the centre of this
labyrinth off screen, the presence of Jane’s faceless boss
registered mainly by the sound of his laughter and screams seeping
through closed doors and down telephone lines. It’s an astute choice
that lends a universality to this unseen spectre, focusing our
attention instead on the trickle-down toxicity of his regime, enabling
his crimes, silencing his enemies, turning his underlings into de
facto accomplices. Astutely, Green shows us how the boss’s
behavioural mantle has been adopted by everyone in this workplace,
creating a culture in which covert aggression and harassment are just
business as usual.

It’s a credit to Garner that, as a character who effectively has no
voice, she manages to say so much about Jane’s predicament through
posture, pose and gesture; the way she seems constantly uneasy in her
office chair; the fleeting glimpse of alarm in her eyes at the sound
of a ringing phone; the slump of exhausted defeat that accompanies her
lonely late-night sandwich. The weight of the world is on her
shoulders, and thanks to Garner’s nuanced performance and Green’s
skilful direction, we feel it upon ours too.

THE ASSISTANT IS STREAMING ON MULTIPLE PLATFORMS.

_MARK KERMODE Is a writer and broadcaster and the Observer's chief
film critic. He is the author of Hatchet Job
[[link removed]] and The Good, the
Bad and the Multiplex
[[link removed]].
Follow him on twitter: @kermodemovie
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