Review: The Assistant (2019)
To be clear, HR exists not to protect employees but to protect management
The Assistant (2019)
Written and directed by Kitty Green
Kitty Green, who makes movies about women under siege, physically and especially psychically, released this film in the middle of the #MeToo movement. It's very simple: a day in the life of a low-level admin assistant to a film industry mogul, with a very close third-person viewpoint -- so close that it gives the movie a nontraditional structure. There's little traditional dialogue, just snatches of people speaking half-sentences.
Jane, the main character, is on screen almost all the time, performing a variety of minor tasks that are both standard for an admin assistant, and here, deeply humiliating. "Tidying up the office" translates into donning rubber gloves and scrubbing what we assume are bodily fluids from the boss's couch. "Making copies" means printing out headshots of actresses, some of whom Jane understands are being considered not for film parts or production roles but quick fucks. "Making appointments" for the boss includes hotel reservations for the purpose of meeting these victims. Receiving phone calls from her boss means being screamed at and called names, after which she must send a groveling email apology if she wants to keep her job.
The parallels between this fictional boss and the white whale of #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, are quite clear, but not only does the boss here not have a name, we never even see him. The depiction is specific enough to be of Weinstein, while general enough to apply to any abusive workplace environment.
Green's frequent collaborator Julia Garner plays the character as if Jane has decided the only way to get through this is to perform as little emotional labor as possible. She is just polite enough to get by with a certain terse, egoless directness; she hardly ever, ever, smiles. It's not hard, in a way, because the workplace environment seems to be brutal for everyone. She's not included in the misogynist jokes, but they're not about her; she only needs to pretend she doesn't hear them. She is not, herself, a target of the boss's rapacity; she only needs to play a part in it.
She only comes close to cracking when the boss sets up a brand-new employee to be raped and does it in a way that is so patently obvious to her that she can’t stand it. She goes to HR but, as in every company, HR exists to protect not employees but managers and the company itself. In this case, the tactics employed by the HR guy (Matthew Macfadyen) seem sympathetic, but only for the purpose of discerning how damaging a complaint might be to the boss. They’re quite easy to see through, but that's one of the film's strengths: illustrating how women in a misogynist organization can't use the organization's own procedures to attack it. They can only endure as enablers.