Green's script offers up one elliptical after the other. Her co-workers may have been in her position before, but their gallows humor and distance from Jane indicates a "better her than me" attitude. Watch Jane take a phone call from her boss and you'll witness the tiniest of emotional shifts as she accepts a verbal beating.
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Everyone looks calm and professional on the surface, but their behaviors reveal sheer terror. They all serve the big boss who hovers over them as an angry voice on the phone or as a bellower from behind his office door. As the office fills with various staffers, their lingo feels impenetrably internal and their job descriptions vague at best.
Leaning into her prior experience, Kitty Green has crafted a story around tiny details and micro-expressions. Everything about her dead-inside demeanor indicates this to be a routine, however creepy and disgusting her chores become.Īt least that's how I interpreted it, because this film spoon feeds you nothing. She turns on lights, makes coffee, prepares paperwork for the executives, and most tellingly, she dons rubber gloves to clean up from what looks like a party of sorts from the night before. We start with a car service picking up Jane at 4:30am and taking her to a dark Soho office building. Told strictly from the point of view of Jane (Julia Garner), the film navigates a dawn to dusk day in the life of an assistant at a New York film production company. Well now, in the age of the #metoo movement, the put-upon support staffer takes center stage and the boss is never seen in documentarian Kitty Green's breathtakingly powerful narrative debut, The Assistant. Think Swimming With Sharks, The Devil Wears Prada, and yes, Horrible Bosses, all of which featured electrifying performances by the actors who got to push their underlings around.
We have had our share of horrible boss movies over the years. THE WORKING DREAD - My Review of THE ASSISTANT (4 Stars) The Assistant is a film made up of small, specific moments that - while not driving towards anything grand or set in stone - analyzes a culture gone awry lost to the conditions of those in power and where the idea of simple human decency quickly fades away. Green sets her film within the world of the film industry (a detail I initially thought was the wrong - or maybe too much the obvious - choice), but what saves this for general moviegoers is that Jane doesn't necessarily have to be working for a powerful Hollywood producer as this could easily transfer to any other corporate environment. In the similarly themed Promising Young Woman the style is more heightened, but the situations aren't - they're very real and regrettably commonplace - and The Assistant operates in this same area where everything that occurs feels oddly ordinary, unpleasantly familiar, and certainly possible. Garner has an amazing presence that translates almost everything we need to know about what the character is feeling without hardly saying a word. Nothing here feels exploitative for the sake of such despite the subject matter, but rather Green paints a delicate portrait of Julia Garner's Jane whom no one notices, but whose every internal conflict and struggle is all we see. There's no gratuitous and/or sensationalized scenes of what happens beyond closed doors, but instead we remain with a lowly clerk who makes copies, gets lunch, and tidies up after meetings. While a story of power and consent this is a story of power and consent told by and from the point of view of a woman. Smart enough to not focus on the person in question, but the machinery set-up around that person and those on the other side of his always closed door, Kitty Green's The Assistant is deliberate to a fault.
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