Written and directed by Kitty Green
Starring Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Jon Orsini, Noah Robbins
Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes
MPA rating: R

by Jaime Davis, The Fixer

Last Friday, I started my morning like any other. At 7:00 am, after three alarms did what they needed to do, I slowly shuffled my way to the kitchen, sleepily scrolled through my phone’s notifications, sent my fiancée a good morning text, and got ready to start my work day. I usually put something on in the background while making breakfast; typically I watch The Today Show on my phone, but lately I’ve been listening to The New York Times podcast, The Daily. On this particular Friday, New York Times reporter Megan Twohey interviewed Donna Rotunno, one of the lead defense attorneys for Harvey Weinstein. What was so striking about this interview was that Twohey (along with her reporting partner Jodi Kantor) wrote a pretty explosive book, She Said, about investigating and breaking the Weinstein story which eventually led to the creation of the #MeToo movement. But, most disconcerting, was what Rotunno said, or not-so-subtly hinted at, as it relates to victims and accusers. At one point, Twohey asked Rotunno if she had ever been the victim of a sexual assault. Rotunno said she had not, and then followed it up with “because I would never put myself in that position.” In that moment, I yelled at my phone and clumsily spilled my coffee all at the same time. Rotunno’s outright victim-shaming shocked the typical calm of my morning routine. I was most certainly awake after that.

The Assistant’s Jane (Julia Garner) also has a typical morning routine she follows with the precision of a human operating a plane in autopilot. At the beginning, Jane heads to work in Manhattan from her home in Queens before much of the city is up. While still dark outside, she spends a few quiet hours in the office organizing, prepping, steeling herself for the inevitable humiliations to come later in the day. It’s all very ordinary: she cleans up after her boss - calmly retrieving a lone earring in the carpet and attempting to remove an unidentified stain on the sofa in his office. She Excels some things, restocks supplies and the obligatory bottles of Fiji water for meetings, prints out multiple copies of scripts and assembles them with brass fasteners. Once the sun is up, she’s joined by two male assistants who appear to relish in their light superiority over her - they’ve been in her spot and understand the “hot seat”, as I call it. As the phones go about ringing, people start trickling in, and fingers begin pointing, she’s part fire fighter, gatekeeper, maid, scapegoat, gopher. Those around Jane pay very little attention to her until there’s a fuck up or someone doesn’t feel like doing their job. She is everyone and no one, all at the same time.

I was a Jane once. Literally the day after graduating from film school, my naive ass was on a plane to Los Angeles where I swore I was gonna make it “big” only to compete with Wharton MBAs for entry-level jobs. It was a complete shock to learn how completely out of my depth I was but I was obsessed with seeing things through. Luckily, finally, after failed interviews with Killer Films and Working Title (my dream companies), I was hired as a development intern by Trigger Street Productions, a little-known outfit run by fairly well-known Kevin Spacey. We all know more about Kevin Spacey now than I think we would like to and while I had limited interactions with the actor/producer, all I can tell you is the work was at times relentless, monotonous, weird, humiliating, frustrating, and pointless. I was pretty unimportant 99.67% of the time, but god forbid you ever thought of doing .33% of something wrong because you sure as heck would feel the abusive wrath of higher ups for all of eternity. It’s a management strategy I will just never understand, but dammit if it hasn’t operated in Hollywood for like, ever.

Jane, who dreams of becoming a film producer, is at the mercy of this passive-aggressive management style - whenever she makes a “mistake” (she’s not really doing anything wrong - everyone in her boss’ orbit is a Grade A Asshole) the Very Powerful Exec, who we do not see during the film, immediately calls to admonish her in low, sinister tones. After these highly constructive feedback sessions, she immediately crafts, with the help of her experienced male coworkers, an apologetic email, which the Big Man responds to with a sudden calm forgiveness and acknowledgement of “I’m hard on you because I see so much potential in you.” It’s a typical abusive cycle that repeats itself twice in the course of the film. Making matters worse, Jane is isolated - her coworkers have little to do with her (not even fellow women), and her parents seem more hung up on the super great opportunity she has as a recent Northwestern grad working for someone so powerful to notice that anything’s wrong. The humiliations are never-ending - even the exec’s kids and personal assistant boss her around, feeding her microaggression after microaggression. Her alone-ness is palpable.

On this particular day, there’s even more for The Assistant to deal with when an attractive, bubbly young woman materializes from Idaho, announcing she was hired by the exec while he was there for a conference and she was working as a waitress (uh huh). Jane is floored, and even more unsettling, The Boss has put new girl up at a very trés swank Manhattan hotel and is currently spending his afternoon there with her. Between the earring, random hints from random employees, and the case of the mysterious Idahoan, Jane is tired of aiding her employer in getting away with what he always gets away with.

An urgent day-in-the-life snapshot of a female assistant to a powerful male head of a film production company, The Assistant feels especially current. At a moment when #MeToo and #TimesUp are still much discussed but perhaps no longer exclusively dominating our voracious news cycle, the film, and its Harvey Weinstein-esque mystery boss, is an important and timely reminder that just because Weinstein is currently on trial doesn’t mean we can start waving the ‘we’ve won’ flag. There is still an insanely long road ahead towards alleviating abuse while promoting equality. In a particularly dismal scene, Jane tries to speak up but is ultimately railroaded by the old-school system built around her. Out of helplessness and concern, she meets with a bored, dismissive HR director (a near perfect Matthew Macfadyen) who all-but admits he’s well aware of her boss’ long-term antics but won’t do a got damn thing about it. This is not surprising, nor an exception. Out in the real world, in the past three weeks alone there have been reports of misconduct at the University of Michigan, Victoria’s Secret, and the French Federation of Ice Sports. It feels like we’re just getting started.

Writer and director Kitty Green, most well-known for documentaries like Casting JonBenet, initially began researching the film’s topic with an eye towards a doc on sexual violence. She began by interviewing students and groups on college campuses about power within institutions and the notion of consent when the Harvey Weinstein case first exploded. Suddenly, many of her colleagues and friends were sharing personal workplace horrors and The Assistant as narrative feature was born. Green approaches the film with a steely minimalism that serves the arresting drama well while Julia Garner holds your attention in such a captivating way. She so quietly draws you into her world that by the close of the film you understand the deep well of her isolation, even if you’ve never been a Jane or knew other Janes.

In the world of The Assistant, as in real life, powerful men still call the shots. You can either resist like Jane, play along like Miss Idaho, turn a blind eye like Mr. HR, or place blame like Donna Rotunno. What’s your move?