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Film about assistant to a New York film mogul details how stress, humiliation and bullying become the enablers for abuse by powerful men
Kelly Green’s The Assistant is a claustrophobic, intimately unsettling movie about the assistant to an arrogant and abusive New York based film mogul; it can claim to be the first drama which addresses the #MeToo issue, and therefore very contemporary – although appearing on the face of it to be set before the #MeToo movement took off, and before this kind of behaviour was publicly challenged. (Having said which, part of the film’s point could well be to suggest that the abuse continues right now.) As a study in media misogyny and the sexual politics of collaboration, it is incidentally much better than the recent Fox News movie Bombshell.
The movie takes place much of the time in near wordlessness, to the sound of ambient office noises – scanners, printers, coffee-makers – subdued murmurings and overheard snatches of conversation and shouting elsewhere, in the inner sanctums of powerful men’s offices. The one stretch of conventional dialogue is the abrupt and jittery conversation that this assistant has when she is rash enough to raise some concerns with the hatchet-faced head of Human Resources. It’s a nerve-jangling sequence which reveals the momentary influence of David Mamet and his Hollywood play Speed the Plow. Continue reading...