A young woman is picked up before sunrise by a driver and travels from her home to her office. She’s the first one in. She makes coffees. Xeroxes endless pages. Arranges the desk of her boss. Packs the drawers. Arranges water. Disinfects a sofa. Wolfs down a bowl of cereal. This ten-minute opening sequence, where we meet Jane – an assistant in a film production company – lays out the basic drudgery of being an assistant in the entertainment industry, and they immediately key us into Jane’s general malaise as she stolidly prepares for her work day. And, oddly, this opening sequence – for all its precision and Julia Garner’s exhausted, but not bitter, face – feels too general for the specific hollowness that will come in the next eighty minutes of Kitty Green’s excellent “The Assistant”.
“The Assistant” presents a day in the life look at a young female graduate whose job seems to be slowly, but surely, wearing her down. And, it makes sense that Green (she writes, directs and edits the film) begins with the innocuity of a day just beginning. We suspect, even in this prosaic opening sequence, that something is not quite right. While performing her menial duties in the opening sequence, Jane finds a single hoop earring by her boss’s sofa. Her nonreaction is reaction enough, especially when her subsequent gloved disinfection of the same sofa is accompanied by the slightest of winces. We suspect, already, that something not-quite-right is afoot here. And, every subsequent moment in “The Assistant” luxuriates in that sensation of something slightly amiss – a film that presents the insidiousness of the entertainment industry not as a slowly building bombshell, but as a series of inane and exhausting improprieties that ultimately wear you down.
“The Assistant” is not the first movie to grapple with the toxicity of demanding employers or the underbelly of casting couch operations in entertainment industries, but it’s been difficult for many to not read into the way it hews close to what the recent #MeToo movement has reaffirmed about sexual misconduct and predatory behaviour in entertainment industries. For many, “The Assistant” has been described as a #MeToo drama, and the description holds. Except, what’s compelling about Green’s work here is the way it relentlessly eschews any generality. There are no metaphors at work here; instead, “The Assistant” is a very grim and very specific tale of how this particular assistant’s daily life is one of drudgery and exhaustion. It very well could resonate with other stories, but Green’s almost surgical structuring of the film avoids any outward-looking musings. Instead, “The Assistant” – like Jane – is catastrophically trapped in this specific world of dread.
As her day goes on, Jane will experience a series of wrongs. The first come from her two co-workers, both male and higher on the totem pole. Their lack of authority does not make their careless needling of Jane’s shortcomings any less exhausting and as the film progresses it becomes a pattern of ways that Jane, a recent university graduate, learns to ignore the worse of the world around her. There are the multiple women meeting with her boss. And her boss’s wife, who calls to shriek at Jane over cancelled credit cards, and her inaccessible husband. The film becomes more of a series of micro events than anything, but the closest thing to an overarching story is the “hiring” of a new female assistant who arrives from out of state, and is put up at a hotel. Green does not need to spell this out for us, especially when Jane’s boss, not long after this new arrival, disappears at the same hotel.
The evasive way of considering the things we suspect but cannot name is part of Green’s dramaturgy here. In many ways, “The Assistant” becomes symptomatic of a particular kind of culture, because we intuit – with little specificity – the casting-couch, predatorial situation at work with just hints. In some ways it feels as if Green is indicting us as well as the industry, because with only hushed voices and hints we already know what’s afoot – and we know, because everything that happens feels rote in its familiarity. And that’s the strongest weapon that “The Assistant” wields. Green avoids any potential hokeyness and prevents anything here from seeming the least bit sensational by presenting the film as a lesson in grim tautness. By leaning into the specificity of Jane, the film disregards generality and aims instead for a specific rat-a-tat of drudgery that makes up her day. The camerawork is the best asset to Julia Garner’s emotive face. There are multiple shots of just Jane’s face, with the camera slightly askew, rendering her as something tiny in front of the encroaching world of her work place behind her. In one of the most evocative shots – one that’s repeated throughout – we see Jane at her desk, gazing slightly off camera after some mishap, or the other. Behind her are the grey walls, and stacked notes but the camera is panned out so that her chest and head takes up a quarter of the frame. It is, as if, she is drowning in the world behind her.
It would be, somewhat, inaccurate to consider this a character study. Beyond a personal touch of a missed birthday wish for her father, Green is deliberately opaque about Jane’s personal life. But, here, it’s not a sign of a filmmaker’s ambivalence about a character. Green presents Jane as a woman consumed by work and work alone. And “The Assistant” is so specific for the way it presents a relentless build-up of various small things turning into a claustrophobic nightmare of one unending terrible thing. It’s the deliberately inward-looking presentation of the crisis that makes “The Assistant” so harrowing. The film seems to be working towards a moment of great catharsis, except Green recognises that for a story so steeped into actual drudgery a moment of catharsis would interrupt the stark clarity of everything here. And, so, it’s closing moment is one of resigned grimness more than anything.
At the end of the film we watch Jane walking down a street, walking away from us. It’s an innocuous moment, except by that time we’ve been so discomfited by all we’ve seen before the shot feels exhausting. It’s a good example of how “The Assistant” works. Individual moments are bad enough, but put all together they are a distressing representation of the worst of the entertainment world, the men who wield their power for ill, and the systems that preserve the status quo.
The Assistant is available for rent and purchase on AmazonPrime Video, iTunes, Vudu, Youtube and other streaming platforms.