Image provided by Vertigo
From Kitty Green (Casting JonBenet) comes an urgent and utterly absorbing feature. The Assistant is a striking, uncomfortable watch, brilliantly performed by lead Julia Garner as a lower-level employee at an entertainment company in modern-day Manhattan.
Garner is Jane, a twenty-something, well-educated college graduate who travels into the city to her production office job from Queens often before it gets light, and returns late into the night. She is ‘The Assistant’ of the title, one to a powerful media executive at a prestigious and very successful international film company. She’s the first in and last to leave, her days spent tidying after other employees, most of who are predominantly male, organising travel plans for her boss and putting up with the continuous barracking of her peers. There is also the explanations she has to give to her employer’s wife for his consistent absenteeism, and the constant threats from the powerful players all around who constantly threaten her position.
Set during one day, the film is an incredibly intimate, slow-burning piece, intricately so; one that is skilfully written, edited and directed by Green – also a frank, extremely worrying insight into the culture of the industry. Garner is exceptional in a breakthrough feature role, a stark contrast from the louder, more brash Ruth in the equally ravelled Netflix series Ozark, in which the young actor is fantastic also. Here, Jane is bubbling under the surface and willing to take a stand against the misogyny and powerful, masculine influence all around her, even if it does fall on deaf ears.
Offering an example of the #MeToo, Time’s Up movement, perhaps the first dramatic film to do so, Green’s film packs a lot in. The unseen boss is always felt, his largely invisible foreboding presence menacing at the end of the phone or in a blunt email, his fear always personified through his other terrified employees, the shit rolling downhill to the poor sole at the bottom having to clean up, whether that be a picking missing earring on the floor of the executive’s office, or the cleansing the infamous casting couch that everyone knows not to sit on.
A work of fiction, but clearly depicting the shocking realism of the environment, Green’s film is exceptional in every way. An absorbing piece remarkably staged with two stand-out performances from Garner and Matthew Macfadyen’s Wilcock, the unsympathetic HR man who is as much a part of the problem as the others.
Set in the entertainment industry but sounding out situations that could be applied to any industry, Kitty Green’s remarkable film shines a big, glowing light on an urgent, repetetive current topic that should not be ignored.
The Assistant is available on digital download from 1st May.
