The specter of Harvey Weinstein looms over every frame of “The Assistant,” though we never see the face of the anonymous New York film-company executive whose toxic behavior drives the story. We hear him, though, laughing conspiratorially with a young female hopeful behind his tightly closed office door, or barking reprimands on the telephone to Jane (Julia Garner), his lowliest staffer.
After these attacks, Jane’s closest co-workers (Noah Robbins and Jon Orsini) resignedly help her compose the necessary apology email, suggesting phrases laden with gratitude and promises to do better. (They’ve been there; they know how to feed the beast.) Otherwise Jane, a recent college grad who hopes to become a producer, is mostly invisible to them as she washes dishes in the break room, copies scripts, makes her employer’s travel plans and fields his phone calls. The ones from women are the trickiest.
Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, “The Assistant” is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment. That funk is breathed by everyone in a movie that strikingly pairs the executive’s demeaning actions with the stifling moral vacancy of the power structure that shields him. In one virtuosic scene, Jane haltingly complains to a seemingly welcoming human resources representative (a marvelous Matthew Macfadyen). The turn taken by their conversation will hit you like velvet-covered shrapnel.
Written and directed by Kitty Green (whose last film was the 2017 documentary “Casting JonBenet”), “The Assistant” is hushed and gray-toned and glacial. More than a few viewers will find it a grim, even taxing watch; but Garner is so wonderfully cast that she makes the slow draining of Jane’s soul almost visible. On the long pre-dawn drive from her Queens apartment to her Manhattan office, the film captures her huddled sleepily in a company car, a small, pale figure dwarfed by rearing skyscrapers. Her fragility, though, is deceptive, and Jane’s anxiety over her boss’s perceived victims must be tugged back into line with a steely self-interest. When she reads his chillingly manipulative email — “I’m tough on you because I’m gonna make you great” — we can almost see her spine straighten with renewed ambition.
Jane isn’t one of those victims — “You’re not his type,” the H.R. guy tells her, in a twisted attempt to reassure — but she doesn’t have to be. The degradations lie in the jewelry and stains she clears from his couch cushions, in the blank checks she types and in the nervously chatting ingénue she transports to a nearby hotel: The spoor of the workplace predator is wearyingly familiar and as ubiquitous as offices themselves. In its muted, minutiae-obsessed way, “The Assistant” is saying to these men, We see you. We have always seen you.
The Assistant
Rated R for harsh words and scattered syringes. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
