The Assistant

Trapped in space: The Assistant

Kitty Green's The Assistant has the cumulative effect of a nightmare. The film chronicles the very long work day of a producer's assistant at a Miramax type studio. The sexism and
dehumanization of the workplace are displayed with a coruscating matter of factness. The major and minor humiliations, featuring paper cuts and medical waste disposal, the assistant endures as she navigates her day paint a corrosive picture.

Ms. Green has the good fortune to have Julia Garner, the most promising of American actors, embody the assistant. Ms. Garner, as she displayed in Ozark and Dirty John, among others, is expert at suggesting her characters' innermost thoughts and feelings. Her performance in The Assistant etches her character's frustration. Jane the assistant, just plain Jane, must tamp down her very self to survive her daily grind. The film is largely silent, with minimal use of music, as Jane goes about menial tasks such as filing, copying and general clean up. When there is conversation, the assistant is largely excluded. Ms Garner plays with glances and gritted teeth through much of The Assistant.

The Assistant conveys the malaise of its workplace through its sickly color, murky lighting and concise, claustrophobic editing. The office contains a host of outmoded techno tools (phones, computers, microwaves, coffee makers and copiers) that themselves create a mood of creepiness and unease. Instead of a straightforward Me Too parable, The Assistant represents a continuation of workplace critiques that began in the silent era with King Vidor's The Crowd and culminated with Mike Judge's Office Space. One's sense of space is constricted in The Assistant to help visualize the concept of a confined and hierarchical society.

Power and status dictates the usage of office space in The Assistant. Underlings stay within their cubes and share cabinets that contain their coffee mugs. Satraps get to store their totems of power, be they golf clubs or injectable Alprostadil syringes, where they wish. Some viewers have been put off by the film's lack of affect. Who can enjoy a detailed illustration of office life, they ask, but this is Ms. Green's point. The Assistant is more a compact Jeanne Dielman... than the uplifting Hollywood protest of Norma Rae and 9 to 5 and it is all the better for it.