The Assistant: Bad Boss and Besieged Junior Boost Powerful #MeToo-Era Drama

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B+

A compact drama with outsize emotional heft, The Assistant is propelled as much by what it doesn’t show as what it does, namely an abusive and omnipotent boss in the mould of Harvey Weinstein who plays by his own rules, most of them dubious, inflicting collateral damage large and small along the way.

All of this is filtered through the eyes of Jane, a terrific Julia Garner who’s in every scene and in every scene, seems desperate to wriggle out of her own skin. Jane is a young assistant at the boss’s movie production office and, we later learn during the film’s creepiest scene with a Machiavellian HR staffer, also an aspiring producer.

First to arrive, last to leave, and forever at the receiving end of nastiness from two more senior male assistants occupying the same oppressive New York office, Jane is the quintessential junior. And so, Jane does banal assistant stuff: emptying waste baskets, washing dishes, scheduling flights, setting up meetings, opening mail.

She also does icky assistant stuff: obfuscating the truth about the boss’s whereabouts when his wife calls, returning left-behind personal items to sheepish lovely young things while transporting others to local hotels, an action Jane eventually realizes with horror is akin to tossing chum to the sharks.

Read our interview with The Assistant writer/director Kitty Green

One moment Jane is being degraded, the next she is praised to high heavens. The emotional teeter-totter keeps Jane off-balance; she constantly second-guesses herself, and the realism of her actions — their recognizable universality — yanks viewers straight into the film. You’ve felt this way, too, guaranteed.

In this, her first fictional feature, documentarian writer/director Kitty Green brilliantly leverages the mundane (a day in the life of an overworked assistant) to highlight the grossly unchecked overreach of those in power, especially those with influence and money. Like Jane, we often get only fragments of what’s going on. The producers she hears musing about the reason for the boss’ late arrival to a meeting (and a warning to never sit on his office couch) seem like unambiguous descriptions of a sexual predator. Are they?

Green’s film is dark and claustrophobic with characters wedged into elevators and tiny kitchens, heightening the sense that there’s no easy exit, just maze after maze. Even areas of apparent refuge quickly become hostile. Witness the aforementioned creepy and climactic scene between Jane and an office HR staffer.

Jane suspects a young woman — ostensibly a new office assistant — has been unwittingly lured from Boise, Idaho to New York be a plaything for her boss, an action Jane has abetted, albeit also unwittingly. Jane tries to blow the whistle. At first, the HR staffer (Matthew Macfadyen) seems sympathetic, worried even.

But as Jane’s story unfurls, the dynamics change; the HR staffer deconstructs the tale with a cutting precision that doubtless comes from practice diffusing such potentially explosive accusations before. It’s spectacularly uncomfortable to watch Jane’s words be twisted and maligned; the rules of engagement finally spelled out. Shut up or leave; there’s hundreds waiting in the wings to take your place.

Welcome to the world of ass-covering office politics. The Assistant is already being hailed as a keystone work of the #MeToo movement. It cuts to the bone.

The Assistant. Written and directed by Kitty Green. Starring Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Kristine Froseth, Makenzie Leigh, Noah Robbins, Dagmara Domińczyk and Purva Bedi. Opens February 7 in Toronto, February 14 in Vancouver and March 6 in Ottawa.