The Assistant, review: the ghost of Harvey Weinstein haunts this Hollywood horror story
Dir: Kitty Green; Starring: Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Kristine Froseth, Makenzie Leigh, Noah Robbins. 85 mins
Harvey Weinstein does not physically appear in The Assistant, nor is he named, but this seething treatment of workplace terror – available now on all streaming platforms, after doing the rounds to much acclaim at festivals – has him very much in mind.
Which other boss from hell – the breathtakingly abusive head of a New York film production company – could this one be modelled on? While never seen, he’s heard, wheeling and dealing behind closed doors, and his muffled yet volcanic rage seeps through twice on a landline to Jane (Ozark’s Julia Garner), a timid employee who has managed five weeks of this and looks barely capable of surviving five more.
Writer-director Kitty Green gives us a straightforward set-up: Jane endures one characteristic Monday doing the bidding of this off-screen pseudo-Weinstein, from several hours before dawn until well after dusk. It’s business as usual, with the weekend’s box-office numbers to crunch, last-minute flights to book for an LA screening, and the elephant of grotesque sexual impropriety trumpeting right next door. The whole point of Green’s film is the routine, submerged, and invisible quality of its horrors: you can readily believe Tuesday might be even worse.
Jane is a smart college graduate with aspirations to be a producer in her own right, but in this office she’s a sacrificial lamb blamed for anything that goes wrong: the merest jamming of a printer, and her two male colleagues, conspiratorial cowards, look over sharply as if to say, Not Today. The boss’s estranged wife phones in with a tirade about their joint credit-card being blocked, and when the call is foisted on Jane to lend a supposedly sympathetic female ear, you can be absolutely sure she’ll get it in the neck for meddling.
All told, this might be the least glamorous backstage portrait of the film world since 1994’s Swimming with Sharks, which put Kevin Spacey (funnily enough) in the swivel-seat of power. But Green’s film is much less dramatically supercharged or in thrall to any David Mamet-esque eruptions of set-piece spleen.
Jane’s job might be a grey purgatory rather than a fiery circle of hell, but this hardly feels like much consolation: played by the mouse-like Garner with award-worthy, jittery nuance, the character is trapped in a precise and unsensationalised vision. Given everything we now know about Weinstein’s practices – he's in prison for rape, so there’s no more “alleged” about it – there’s hardly any need for more hectoring emphasis.
The quiet nadir of Jane’s Monday is crossing the street to speak to Wilcock (Matthew Macfadyen), a lawyer in the HR department, about a new recruit who’s just been sworn in. This is Sienna (Kristine Froseth), a young waitress from Boise, Idaho, whose qualifications for being flown into town and put up in a swish hotel are not what you might call resumé-appropriate.
We know from HBO’s Succession how diabolically Macfadyen can bluff and stonewall, which he does here without a flicker of moral conscience, as Jane advances her detailed suspicions during a ten-minute-long interview.
The scene does crucial work: it’s to make it clear how Weinstein got away with it, by relying on an insidious, back-slapping support network swatting every complaint away with threats of unemployment. The Assistant might remove the man from our field of vision, but it etches his spider-web with chilling plausibility, showing us a workforce churning with collective dread, and letting him prowl on the periphery unchallenged.