‘The Assistant’ mines #MeToo power player saga for workplace tale
MOVIE REVIEW
“THE ASSISTANT”
Rated R. At Kendall Square Cinema.
Grade: B+
From the psychotic derangement of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” to the madness and kinky sex of “Secretary,” we have been fascinated by those who strive in the outer offices of America’s power brokers.
In the case of “The Assistant,” we have a #MeToo-ready, day-in-the-life take of what it might have been like to be a young woman working for a ridiculously demanding, hot-tempered and unseen film executive much like the person we heard Harvey Weinstein reportedly was before his precipitous fall from the heights of the film fortress known as the Weinstein Co.
Bronx-born Emmy Award winner Julia Garner, who is so convincing as the backwoods grifter Ruth Langmore in Netflix’s “Ozark,” is Jane, a recent college grad and intern who lands the coveted job of the fearsome lord’s assistant despite competition from the 400 or so others who sent resumes. Jane wakes well before dawn in her modest Astoria digs and is taken in a car (one of her few perks) to the office, where she is the first to arrive at her employer’s place of business in what looks like Manhattan’s Soho District and is the last to leave.
Cinematographer Michael Latham makes pre-dawn Manhattan a dark wonderland. Jane’s job is to turn on the lights, facilitate the office, arrange meetings, make copies of weekly grosses, arrange the boss’s schedule, books his flight out of Teterboro airport for Los Angeles, maintain his supply of smoothies and medications, including evil-looking syringes, and play interference on the phone with his foreign-sounding wife.
In one scene, she cleans a spill of uncertain origin. She cleans spills of certain origin, too. Jane suspects the boss is sexually harassing the parade of very young women, who come and go at an impressive rate. One of them, Sienna (Kristine Froseth), comes to the office from South Dakota to take a job as another assistant (is she Jane’s replacement?), although Sienna is oddly booked into a room at the posh Mark. Another is booked to meet Jane’s employer at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. What is Jane to do? She is terribly conflicted.
The two young men who share the open office space with her keep to themselves, unless Jane is required to write a formal apology for some supposed failure or crossing of the line on her part. In which case, one of them helps her.
Aussie writer-director Kitty Green, whose previous credits are documentaries, such as the controversial “Casting JonBenet,” wisely keeps the camera on Garner’s face, which remains calm, but trembles just beneath the surface with anxiety, uncertainty and fear. “The Assistant,” which boasts a suitably nerve-wracking score by Tamar-kali of “Mudbound,” is a psychologically realistic variation on a theme of “Beauty and the Beast.” The boss is a specter, as well as an ogre, never seen on camera and heard only on the phone (voice of Jay O. Sanders) in threatening tones.
For Jane, an aspiring producer, her job is a priceless opportunity to mingle with the most powerful in the business, a source of both pride and humiliation, an education and a prison. What is Jane assisting exactly and what sort of Faustian pact is her job? Is it assisting the serial assault of young women not unlike herself, although she is assured by a sleazy company lawyer (Matthew Macfayden of “Succession”) that she is “not his type.” Maybe not, but Garner is riveting.
(“The Assistant” contains profanity.)
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2GUICbY
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