Berlinale 2020: The Assistant (Kitty Green)
USA.
Rating: ****
It’s been nearly three years since various reporting efforts and brave testimonies -collectively grouped under the viral Me Too banner- exposed how sexual abuse has been entrenched in the business of Hollywood. Is it surprising that few films have tackled the subject? Last year’s Bombshell was a lukewarm attempt to tell one specific case- but in basing itself firmly in the historical particular of the Roger Ailes case the film seemed content to squish one bad apple while leaving the overall culture that facilitated the likes of Ailes and Weinstein more or less intact.
While seemingly more modest than Bombshell’s starry offering Kitty Green’s film The Assistant is more ambitious in what it has to say. Set in a high end production company in New York -not unlike the Weinstein Company- the film is a day in the life of Jane (Julia Garner), the young assistant to a top movie mogul. First in the office at an ungodly hour, we watch Jane getting the place in order, printing out schedules, firing off emails. With the stream of colleagues arriving we feel the pace of the day notching up a gear. Green, playing on our expectations of what is to come, bakes into the surface banalities of the workplace hints of a sinister undercurrent. Her more senior colleagues -which is practically everyone else- rarely make eye contact when talking to her, their faces glued to all important screens. Yet she is often observed from behind and over her shoulder by overbearing male colleagues who insist on giving her advice. In this isolating environment observation is one-way, and Green’s camera, looming over Jane, places us into this power dynamic.
Jane’s desk is positioned outside His office. The company’s unnamed boss remains an unseen presence, discerned only as a barking voice such as when he phones to shout at Jane for mishandling a call from his estranged wife. Green captures the unnerving intimacy involved in Jane taking the verbal abuse down the line. Later, after another earful of bile, Jane receives an email from the boss telling her he actually thinks she’s great and has a bright future. Like a classic bully, a moment of abuse is followed up with flattery- even someone as discerning as Jane is vulnerable, once her esteem has been sufficiently shattered, to perverse loyalty.
To compound Jane’s anxiety, a girl called Ruby arrives in the office claiming to be a new assistant. Recruited by the boss when he was on business in Indiana, Ruby is tall blonde with a pretty face and no film industry experience. When asked to take Ruby to meet Him in private at a hotel, Jane smells a rat. On returning to the office she pops in to see the HR manager Wilcock (Matthew Macfadyen) to raise her concerns. Yet in the course of their ten minute interview -the film’s only scene of extended dialogue- Jane is ripped to shreds. If she isn’t reporting anything Rudy had done or said, what exactly is the nature of her concern? In this moment we are all vicariously Jane: we know what’s going on but in this pre-Me Too moment the dial has yet to shift and the means of articulating the problem are not available to Jane. Macfadyen, acting in the vein of his corporate stooge character in Succession, has a read between the lines menace that stood out as oddly showy in a film that is otherwise convincingly low-key. The power of the scene belongs to Garner as she shows Jane, fumbling and backtracking and eventually apologising for wasting the HR man’s precious time. In this moment she realises that everyone knows what is going on but for various reason can’t, won’t or don’t want to see it.
Where a film that showed a Weinstein figure brought to book would have obvious appeal, Green has taken a less self-satisfied route by recreating an historical moment that makes it impossible for Jane to turn her disquiet into positive action. Jane may go on to blow the whistle on Him; but here, through these available channels, she is just sticking her neck out and looking stupid. And for a young woman who’s been given a plum job at a top company, looking stupid is game over. It’s remarkable to think that this ‘historical moment’ is only three years ago, and we may ask how many of those who facilitated and designed the structures that allowed the abusers to operate are now, all of a sudden, conveniently clear-eyed about what happened and will remain in place for the foreseeable. I bet even Wilcock is now teaching courses in combating harassment in the work place.
