How can powerful sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein exploit young women’s ambitions for decades without being held accountable? Some of the answers are revealed, in micro fashion, in writer/director Kitty Green’s bleak, chilling and timely film, The Assistant.
Jane (Julia Garner) has only been at her job as a junior assistant to a powerful New York City entertainment mogul for five weeks. But she’s smart enough to know that something is deeply rotten about the man (who we never see) and the office culture that protects and enables him.
Jane’s dream is to be a producer someday, and this job is her entry point to a career she desperately wants. She works tirelessly, arriving at the office before dawn, completing a mind-numbing set of chores before her co-workers even arrive. She brews coffee, prints spreadsheets, loads a mini-fridge with bottles of water. She cleans up food from a coffee table while clueless men stand by and watch her. And she finds an earring on the floor next to the boss’ couch.
The earring is the first of a series of clues that the boss is up to no good. The beautiful woman who comes to claim the earring won’t look Jane in the eye. Jane takes phone calls from his hysterical wife, demanding to know where he is. While her male colleagues snicker and roll their eyes, Jane becomes increasingly distressed.
Then a very young, attractive woman arrives, saying the boss has hired her as an assistant after meeting her in a restaurant where she was waitressing. Jane is asked to book a room at a fancy hotel and escort her there. “Is this where they put you when you started?” the naive newcomer asks in the cab, and Jane’s pained facial expression says it all.
After her conscience moves her to action, she visits an HR office where things get worse. A manager (Matthew Macfadyen) first dismisses her concerns and then reminds her that her silence is expected. “I can see that you’ve got what it takes. Why are you in here trying to throw it all away with this bullshit?” he asks, reminding her that he has 400 resumes piled up for her position. As she leaves, deflated, he says “I don’t think you have anything to worry about; you’re not his type.”
The filmmaking style puts you directly in Jane’s uncomfortable shoes. There’s no inspirational soundtrack, no cathartic telling off of the boss. When she returns to the office after her failed attempt to report his behavior, he verbally abuses her on the phone and demands an apology, which her more experienced coworkers help her craft. She receives an email in reply: “I’m tough on you because I’m going to make you great.”
I’m sorry to report that The Assistant is almost too real to endure. Only the headlines of Weinstein’s rape conviction, released on the same day as I screened the film, made it bearable. But the film serves as a testament to the misogynist power structure that has ruled Hollywood. Hopefully, it will continue to be transformed as survivors come out of the shadows to tell their stories.