The Assistant

 

In writer / director Kitty Green's The Assistant (2019), Julia Garner (Ozark's Ruth Langmore) plays Jane, a fairly new executive's assistant in the New York office of a movie production company run by a tyrannical lothario who never appears on camera but is voiced by Tony Torn. (Yes, it is clearly supposed to feel like Miramax.)

The film's story is set during one very long day for Jane. We watch as she is belittled, patronized and threatened by nearly every one in the office. She meets a young woman hired by the studio boss to be yet another production assistant, despite having no experience, few qualifications but a pretty face.

Jane takes her concerns that the woman is being expoited to the director of human resources, Wilcock (Matthew Macfayden), who recasts Jane's concerns as jealousy and warns her that pursuing the complaint would end badly for her. Jane, a smoldering ember of fear and contempt, retreats and resigns herself to the harshness of the world she says she wants to be a part of.

Green's slow burn of a script and Garner's methodical, understated performance give searing voice to the topic of sexual exploitation in the worplace and leaves unanswered, intentionally, the picture's central question, expressed by Jane to Wilcock -- "What can we do?"

The Assistant is too subdued to be accurately characterized as a rallying call for #MeToo advocates, but its washed-out starkness lends the issue the weariness of common practice. And that will surely anger and activate many viewers.