Caught in coverups of predatory bosses
Specter of Weinstein haunts ‘Assistant’ on long, degrading workday
Kitty Green was on the Stanford campus in fall 2017, conducting interviews for a film about sexual misconduct on college campuses, when news of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke.
“My phone was flooded with the news, and I was hearing from so many friends in the industry,” Green said. Their words and the claims against Weinstein stuck with her, to the point that when she returned to New York, Green decided to shift the focus of her project toward what we would now call a #MeToo story.
“After 10 years in the film industry, I’d had a bunch of bad experiences myself,” said Green, 35, who had just had some success with her truecrime documentary
“Casting JonBenet.” “I’d witnessed and personally experienced misconduct. After the Weinstein scandal was out in the open, people were more open to talking about their own experiences.”
Green interviewed close to 100 women, including some who worked for Weinstein at Miramax and the Weinstein Co. She also made a point of broadening her research beyond media. “I studied architecture for a year or two, so my friends are architects and engineers. I spoke to them, and their experiences were similar. Many of them had predatory bosses. They worked primarily as assistants and had trouble getting promotions, so I became interested in how the entire system is structured against us. My friends in tech had similar problems, so
these patterns were emerging.”
The result of those conversations is “The Assistant,” Green’s feature film about a day in the life of a producer’s assistant, the type of person New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the Weinstein story, characterize as being part of the “complicity machine” that enabled Weinstein’s monstrous behavior for so many years.
Played with quiet, restrained intensity by Julia Garner (a breakout success in “Ozark”), Jane is a recent Northwestern graduate, an aspiring film producer who has been working for five weeks as a junior assistant to a media mogul. He is clearly based on Weinstein, yet the character is never named or shown onscreen. Instead, we hear his gruff voice and are aware, through Jane’s perspective, of his towering presence, a shadowy menace in the corner office.
Written and directed by
Green, “The Assistant” follows Jane through one long day on the job, beginning with her 5 a.m. ride in a town car from her apartment in Queens to the media company’s Manhattan office, where, as the lowestlevel employee (and the only woman among the executive’s small team), she is expected to be the first one in and the last to leave.
The movie plays out in a tense series of scenes that slowly amplify Jane’s qualms about her role in the company. As she performs routine tasks, sordid details create a portrait of a toxic work environment and show the ease with which a predator is enabled.
Jane photocopies a thick stack of head shots of beautiful young actresses. She adds a lastminute female passenger to her boss’ latenight flight to Los Angeles. She finds a mysterious gold earring on the carpet and dons gloves to clean unmentionable stains off his couch. She even methodically lines up his prescriptions in his desk drawer and puts his used syringes in a hazmat bag, something she has clearly done before (a detail drawn from reports that Weinstein had his assistants deliver erectiledysfunction meds).
Jane couches the chairman’s schedule in euphemism when on the phone with clients or his infuriated wife; he’s always “in a personal,” or “in a screening room.”
“I wanted people to look at this whole situation, the prevalence of female exploitation in the workplace, from a different perspective. Instead of top down, let’s look from the bottom up,” Green said at a hotel in the Colorado mountains during last summer’s Telluride Film Festival, where “The Assistant” had its world premiere. The film opens in
Bay Area theaters Friday, Feb. 7. “I really wanted to focus on the ordinary rather than the extraordinary in her day, so that it’s all relatable.”
In “The Assistant,” Green chose to focus on the damage caused by a Weinsteinlike monster, but she also wanted the film to portray the more pervasive problem of sexism in all industries that keeps so many ambitious, young female employees stuck at the bottom of the office hierarchy.
Jane is the mature house mom to her juvenile male coworkers. They throw wadded paper at her, complain when she brings back the wrong lunch order and expect her to babysit their boss’ rambunctious young kids when their nanny drops them at the office.
“Making sure we lived her day with her was really important,” Green said. “I was definitely interested in showing the banality of her job and this idea of gendered labor. What are the women’s jobs, and what do the men get to do?
“Jane isn’t fully aware that some of the tasks she’s doing are enabling (her boss), that she’s being drawn into complicit behavior unwittingly. But she’s starting to connect the dots.”
In one of the film’s standout scenes, Jane takes her complaints to a human resources manager (played by Matthew Macfadyen from “Succession”), only to have her concerns batted away and her motives questioned.
The audience can see on Jane’s face that she’s demoralized by the futility of trying to stop her boss’ wrongdoing, and by the accumulation of degradations.
On her way home that night, she stops to call her father, who excitedly asks about her new job. “We want to hear all about it,” he says.
If he only knew.