The 50 best films of 2020 in the UK, No 8: The Assistant
The horrors and headlines of the Harvey Weinstein exposé, and the torrent of #MeToo stories of sexual abuse, harassment and workplace misogyny it unleashed, are by now cemented in public consciousness, a scandal that shocks without surprise. But The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green’s claustrophobic, chilling feature about the poison dripping through one day at a toxic production company, distils the Weinstein story into one of the most gripping, unsettling movies of the year – by shifting the spotlight. The film changes focus thrillingly, from the famous bad men to the cultures, assumptions and hierarchies of power that enabled them; from the perpetrator, victim or journalist to the liminal, compromised position of lowlevel adjacency.
Julia Garner (Ozark) is brilliant as Jane, an archetypical young female assistant at a Weinstein-esque production company in New York, fresh out of university and hungry to prove herself in a cut-throat industry. Over the course of one overlong winter’s day at the office ( be the first to arrive and last to leave, she’s told), Jane’s radar for something rotten at the company, from its unnamed, feared boss to its frontoffice boys’ club to the boss’s orbit of young women, escalates from pings of doubt to a full roar.
Green’s direction hovers overhead or clings tight to Garner’s face, imbuing the mundane tasks of an exploited entry-level role – start the coffee, answer the phones, make the copies – with seeping dread. Jane finds used syringes in the boss’s trash (Weinstein allegedly used penile injections for fastacting erections). She defuses furious phone calls from his wife with lies, records large payouts with no listed purpose, witnesses a mysterious meeting between a lawyer and an unnamed young woman. In the most troubling sequence, Jane is expected to escort a young, pretty intern on her first day to a “meeting” at the boss’s hotel room. Nothing to see here, Jane is repeatedly told – most insidiously by an HR stand-in (a pitch-perfect Matthew Macfadyen) who reports directly to the boss and stifles Jane’s blaring intuition with politely threatening praise. You show promise, he says. Just do your job.
It’s a disturbingly well-observed portrait of the compartmentalisation and deference to power that facilitated Weinstein and other abusers, broadly construed with details from Green’s interviews with Jane-like employees. The corrosive effect of being the woman relegated to lunch duty, fed verbal validation instead of pay rises or opportunity, burned out by a culture of silence, gaslit on the promise of “you’re so talented” ( be a good girl) – all of that courses through Garner’s glazed eyes and hard-set mouth, in a masterclass performance of rage and self-doubt bottled in real time.
The Assistant offers no easy answers. Report to whom? At what cost? Burned out and confused, her own ambition wielded against her, Jane is caught at a crossroads that offers no easy answers – the layers of complicity are as grey as winter in New York, in a film that crawled under my skin long after the credits.