‘I won’t let you down again…’
With nothing being released at the cinema, any theatrical film released via streaming services is going to create a bigger buzz than usual. The Assistant has garnered rave reviews and has been described as the first film of the #MeToo movement. Long time readers will know I’m not a fan of any movie that has a strong political or social stance at its core. A good story is a good story, it doesn’t need a message. That being said, the long overdue sea change that has swept through Hollywood in recent years is something that could have been ripe for a cinematic plucking, but The Assistant never quite justifies its own existence.
Jane (Julia Garner) works as an assistant to a unseen movie studio executive. Over the course of a day, we see her humiliated, ignored and belittled in an environment that is more Chinese water torture than full frontal abuse. This culminates in a chilling exchange with a hideous HR rep (Matthew Macfadyen) that leaves Jane questioning her own role within the company.
There’s a lot to like here. Committing to such subtlety over the course of a feature length film is a brave move, and Garner is genuinely fantastic as the titular assistant. Her co-workers are suitably condescending and cynical (a little overly so at times), and Macfadyen is quietly hateful in his role as the company’s protector.
The problem is that large swathes of The Assistant are, for want of a better word, boring. I understand that the message here is the mundanity of patriarchal abuse, but over the length of a movie, that in and of itself eventually becomes mundane. It also feels like The Assistant thinks it is being revelatory when this is actually old ground. Mad Men explored gender politics in the workplace over a decade ago, and did it much better. We all know how these kind of men behave, we know that office culture perpetuates this bad behaviour, what we don’t have is a solution. A film about searching for the answer to that problem would perhaps have been more interesting than what writer/director Kitty Green eventually served up. A missed opportunity.