Movie Review: "The Assistant" Asks, 'What If You Worked for a Weinstein?'

Ozark’s Julia Garner quietly stuns in this complicated, conflicting film.

There is no end to the humiliation in The Assistant, which imagines what it must have been like to serve as a downtrodden PA to a Harvey Weinstein type, and to accidentally but undeniably become his accomplice.

It comes from Australian writer-director Kitty Green and stars Julia Garner—the Emmy-winning dynamo from Ozark—as Jane, the assistant at the picture’s center.

Garner holds back on the Ozark-ian snark to play a pursed and powerless film industry aspirant. Jane works at one of three assistant desks in a New York production office for an unnamed and unseen entertainment mogul. We hear her boss only occasionally: when he’s denigrating and demoralising Jane over the phone, or chortling behind closed doors with male colleagues or the young actresses led to his office. It's clear, however, that he's modelled after Weinstein, a long-time Hollywood terror whose misconduct was exposed during the #metoo movement. He's now serving 23 years in prison for a first-degree criminal sex act and third-degree rape.

Over one seemingly uneventful day we bear witness to the many, varied indignities Jane suffers at the hands of deadened, casually sexist colleagues and her sexual miscreant of a boss. She hears whispers—and so do we, barely audibly—of the crimes and misdemeanours he commits, normalised though they may be. Jane certainly suspects enough to approach HR with a complaint. But when she tries to articulate what he might be guilty of to the department head Wilcock (a brilliantly smarmy, gaslighting Matthew Macfadyen) it fails to take shape. So Wilcock asks for her compliance, couching it in a threat, asking if she really want to put her long-term goals at risk by raising a fuss. After all, as he says through a s***-eating grin, "We could use more women producers."

Jane and the rest of her colleagues are always grasping at air when it comes to acknowledging their tyrant’s abuse. Neither can the audience say with authority what he’s doing (especially if you went in with zero knowledge of the inspiration to this tale). Yet, as Green paints it, this is willful ignorance, because it’s easy to draw conclusions based on the torrent of evidence that passes Jane’s desk. The heavy burden on Garner, as Jane, deciding whether or not she can live with this, and enable it, becomes the slow-simmering tension beneath The Assistant’s antiseptic mundanity. It’s the game within the game: during the long silences, we wonder how far and wide the blame for systemic abuse, sexual or otherwise, should be shared. And how widespread are the victims?

It’s a simple, clear-eyed and effectively menacing debut from Green, with a powerful and understated performance from Garner (whose naturally buoyant hair is even repressed here). Viewers who love cinema will feel conflicted by having ignored, for convenience, the manipulative and disenfranchising power that has long run rampant in Hollywood. Why should someone like Jane hang in there? Why should any woman? Well, maybe so they can one day make a film like The Assistant. Still, what a terrible price to pay.

4/5

Rated M for coarse language. The Assistant is now available to rent via Foxtel On Demand and will be available to Rent On Demand from 24 June via multiple platforms including Google Play, iTunes, Fetch TV, Telstra Bigpond, Sony (Playstation Network), Microsoft & Quickflix.