Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
A day in the life
The Assistant alludes to the Harvey Weinstein disaster, but could happen anywhere at any time to anyone.
The monster is never seen. Over the course of a single day, we hear him, laughing, crunching bones in his inner sanctum, cursing savagely on the phone. We feel his gravity bending the world toward his orbit. We see the stains he has left behind, the jewelry that has fallen from his victims. We read his emails.
He has no name. He’s just Him, the looming power behind an apparently thriving Manhattan-based movie production company. (Sound like anyone you know?)
Jane (Julia Garner, an Emmy winner for Netflix’s Ozark) is his lowliest servant. He sends a car to pick her up at her Astoria, Queens apartment before dawn; she rides sleepily into Manhattan and opens up the offices of his movie production company in Tribeca. She answers the phone, unpacks bottles of water, prints copies of scripts and box office receipts. She has been there five weeks. She wants to be a producer.
So she tidies up and orders lunches. Things fall to her because her colleagues, two young men (Jon Orsini and Noah Roberts), seem to be engaged in more critical business. Sometimes they seem indifferent to her, sometimes mildly empathetic.
We see that they lack her seriousness, they are silly and callow while she is as steely as she is slight. She does not allow herself the mocking eye roll. She does not deign to listen in to the phone conversations they find so amusing. She understands she is here to pay dues; she gets on with things.
Maybe that’s been noticed by the man behind the door, whose syringes she orders, whose biohazards she deals with.
She is designated to take the calls of the ogre’s wife, who wants to know about the credit cards and where he is and who he’s with. She is sorry, but she does not have him at the moment.
She messes up; for a moment, she is too empathetic. He chews
her out, snarling vulgarities in her ear. She is the least powerful person in the company, so she bears it stoically.
Kitty Green, the Australian documentarian who wrote and directed The Assistant, has said her film is not about Harvey Weinstein, though it certainly alludes to the mogul’s specific reign of terror. She has said that she preferred to keep the monster off-screen because she thinks bad men get too much screen time in our culture, but she might have also thought about how keeping him offstage makes him scarier.
She has made a film that is almost monochromatic, an almost suffocating realistic workplace procedural that calls to mind Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feature Jeanne Dielman in its intense focus on the quotidian details of the main character’s routine — the things that are normally left out of movies.
Green is also obviously interested in how a corporate structure can enable and insulate a bad actor, in how power corrupts those who seek it as well as those who wield it. Bureaucracies tend to protect the status quo, to regard the process as so much consensual sausage-making.
Jane becomes alarmed that her boss has brought in a pretty young woman (Kristine Froseth) as a new assistant. He met Sienna, a Boise girl who worked on a movie in Salt Lake City, while she was waitressing in Sun Valley. He has put her up in a five-star hotel on the Upper East Side. Jane is assigned to escort her to the hotel.
“Where did they put you up when they brought you in?” the wide-eyed kid asks. They didn’t.
Jane is so disturbed by this that she walks next door, where the more mundane business aspects of the company are handled. She is ushered into the offices of Human Resources manager Wilcock.
At first, I thought the casting of Matthew Macfayden, a soft-spoken British gentleman who has lately become famous for playing the jackass Tom on HBO’s Succession, as Wilcock might have been a little too on the nose. (Because, after all, HR exists to defend the company’s interests, not necessarily the employee’s.)
But, American accent aside, Wilcock isn’t another variation on Tom; though Jane’s meeting with him isn’t helpful, you understand the position he’s in. And there might be some jealousy deep down in Jane, maybe she’s not simply interested in Sienna’s well-being. Maybe there is the slightest disappointment in not being “his type.”
Anyway, the details accumulate, Jane performs the most banal tasks. There’s a janitorial staff, but she’s still required to tidy up behind everyone. It’s a job like any other, it can be a grind.
Not every capable actor could pull this off. There’s a reserve and intensity to Garner that makes her watchable, even as she collates scripts and attends to other mundane tasks. An animating intelligence plays on her face even as she declines to react. Were she not so watchable, The Assistant would feel much longer than its 87 minutes.
Even with Garner, and the electric scene between her and Macfayden, some will view The Assistant as one of those movies where nothing much happens other than micro-aggressions and the sordidly ordinariness of business as usual (or perhaps business as we used to perceive it as usual).
And maybe that’s fair enough, especially since there’s little uplift or humor, and no real sense that justice might arrive.
But many women will see themselves and their stories in Jane. Most of us are, at some point in our lives, the least important person in the room and have felt powerless when we’ve seen others treated badly. A lot of us have worked for monsters and maybe told ourselves that if we ever had the chance, we would do things differently.
But there are no monsters in mirrors; the monster is never seen.