The Assistant

Australian documentarian Kitty Green (Ukraine is not a Brothel, Casting JonBenet) makes an impressive narrative feature début with The Assistant. Julia Garner stars as Jane, a recent college graduate working as a junior assistant at a New York film production company headed by a toxic, Weinsteinesque boss. The film follows a day-in-the-life-of structure. Green’s camera passively but carefully observes Jane as she wakes up early, takes a company car from her Queens apartment to the cold, dark office in Manhattan (arriving hours before many of her colleagues even wake up), and spends the day performing the many menial duties that young wannabe film producers are often relegated to, lacking the money or connections to skip a few rungs on the corporate ladder.

We watch Jane making coffee, making copies, emptying trashcans, getting lunches, answering the phone, logging expenses, arranging travel, and running interference for her unseen boss. On more than one occasion, she also must deal with her boss’s anger when anything she does displeases him. It doesn’t take long for viewers to become aware that existing in such a subtly degrading and dehumanizing environment takes its toll on everyone who works there. Jane deals pretty well with the constant minor-level abuse that’s slowly eroding her soul, but when a new young female junior assistant arrives out of the blue from Idaho, Jane considers taking her concerns about sexual harassment to the company’s Human Resources department, possibly putting her own job at risk.

The success of The Assistant is that it plays as both a spare, restrained, naturalistic study in workplace minutia AND as a Kafkaesque nightmare that haunts the viewer’s memory long after the film concludes. Green and her creative team make excellent choices every step of the way—the cold, antiseptic lighting of the office settings; the long, locked-down takes where we can observe multiple characters in the same frame; the lack of any on-the-nose speechifying; and the strict avoidance of cinematic melodrama into the work-a-day proceedings. 

Garner (We Are What We Are, Grandma, and television shows like The Americans and Ozark) underplays Jane perfectly. And the choice by Garner and Green to portray their protagonist in a less-than-heroic fashion is also astute. She’s smart and capable, but she’s also timid and unsure of herself. When she considers stepping up to “do the right thing” we wonder if it’s entirely for altruistic reasons. Watching her trying to deal with one awkward/demoralizing/oppressive situation after another we wonder, how in the hell is this small, mousey little woman ever going to succeed as a producer in the cutthroat world of Show Biz. But, of course, that highlights one of the films central points. Without directly asking it, The Assistant raises the question of why in nearly every big-money industry (show-biz being just the most visible in the #MeToo era) is the worst type of predatory, misogynistic, and abusive behavior tolerated, accepted and normalized?