Film review

  • The Assistant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kitty Green (2019)

    Writer-director Kitty Green’s first feature details a single day of working life in the New York offices of a film production company, as experienced by Jane (Julia Garner), a recent recruit to the company after graduation from Northwestern University and a couple of intern jobs.  She’s a junior assistant to the organisation’s boss.  He remains unseen throughout the film (his voice is heard occasionally on the telephone, bawling Jane out) but he’s evidently a sexual predator.  Jane’s early morning duties include cleaning up his office from the previous day.  As she scrubs a sofa, the expression on her face suggests she’s trying to remove bodily fluid stains from it.  She finds an earring, whose young female owner comes to claim it later in the day.  A new addition to the secretariat turns up in reception.  Sienna (Kristine Froseth), from Boise, Idaho, has no relevant work experience but she’s not exactly unqualified.  The boss met her on a business trip to Sun Valley, where Sienna was waitressing.  He decided he wanted her more regularly available.

    The Assistant appears to be set in the present though any mention of Harvey Weinstein or #MeToo is as conspicuous by its absence from the film as the face of the Weinstein-ish villain.  That’s essential to Kitty Green’s having-it-both-ways approach.  This is a polemic that needs currency in order to have currency:  any indication that it’s taking place in the pre-#MeToo era would risk allowing a viewer to wonder if things have improved in the meantime.  Green, nevertheless, tells Nikki Baughan in a Sight & Sound (May 2020) interview that ‘the film is set before the rise of the MeToo movement, before we had the language to talk about this stuff’.  The truth, more likely, is that #MeToo ‘language’ would have got in Green’s way, complicated the issue.  By keeping quiet, in what she puts on screen and soundtrack, about exactly when the story is taking place, she minimises the danger of diluting the urgency of her jeremiad.

    On the subject of keeping quiet, some of the dialogue is difficult to hear – and not just that spoken by disembodied voices on the other end of Jane’s numerous short telephone conversations.  This inaudibility is largely the result of diction rather than low volume:  in the role of an HR manager that Jane goes to see, Matthew Macfadyen proves it’s quite possible to speak both naturally and clearly without raising your voice.  On the whole, though, Green, in creating an alienating office environment, seems more intent on letting the audience hear what the technology, rather than its personnel, has to say:  the menacing sounds of the photocopier and the microwave in the office kitchenette come through loud and clear.  (Ditto the agonised strings in Tamar-kali’s score, heard over the closing credits of what is, for most of its running time, a music-free film.)

    Not that the muffled speech matters much anyway:  the film’s insistent message is easy to read from the visuals.  Cinematography and design combine to proclaim that The Assistant is set in a dark time.  The doors and furnishings are predominantly grey.  Battleship or gunmetal grey, perhaps:  the workplace is a war zone, a place where atrocities occur.  Jane’s clothes are colour co-ordinated with her claustrophobic surroundings.  She wears dark trousers, an off-white scarf, a dusty pink top.  When Jane is seen in longer shot, Michael Latham’s sepulchral lighting sometimes gives her close-fitting top the look of exposed flesh.  When she’s on the verge of tears in HR, her interviewer pushes Kleenex in her direction: even the square tissues-holder is metallic and forbidding.

    Kitty Green tells S&S that the predator boss never appears because:

    ‘We’ve had enough stories about those men.  I really wanted the audience to sense how much power he has over that workplace, but I didn’t want anything too graphic.  I think we all know what happens behind those closed doors now.  To me, what happens on the other side of that door is more interesting.’

    Her suggestion that, because he’s physically invisible and his sexual shenanigans occur off-screen, the story isn’t ‘about’ the predator boss is nonsense.  As Green acknowledges, his bullying egocentrism dictates ‘what happens on the other side of the door’ and the reactions of his subordinates, male as well as female.  His behaviour drives The Assistant’s plot, such as it is.  Green does also illustrate what she calls ‘the micro-aggressions and small details that often get ignored and overlooked’.  Jane shares an office with two male assistants (Jon Orsini and Noah Robbins).  Their level of seniority isn’t clear but they treat Jane as a skivvy.  It’s clear the heroine is hard-working and competent:  Green devotes plenty of screen time to describing the minutiae of her demeaning chores, as if to demonstrate how unfairly treated Jane is because she’s a woman, though some of this seems like a function of grade and newness in the job – which Jane has been doing for only five weeks – as much as of gender.  While it’s true this kind of dogsbody is more likely to be female than male, Green doesn’t help her case by having other, presumably senior women employees in evidence show Jane no more consideration than the men do.  Besides, the monstrous boss – who comes across as three parts Weinstein, two parts Trump – seems to treat everyone like crap.

    That said, Green works in a variety of misandrist touches, showing males in a bad light even when they’re not being consciously nasty.  During the first half of Jane’s day, the only two men (in fact the only two people) to show her a semblance of friendliness are a fellow-traveller in the lift, and one of her co-workers in the boss’s outer office.  Jane and the man in the lift (a cameo from Patrick Wilson, not exactly as himself but as ‘Famous Actor’, according to the cast list) move forward to exit at the same time:  when she then stands back to let him go first, he naturally does just that, smiling and lightly touching her in acknowledgement.  In return for trying and failing to appease the boss’s wife, who phones to demand why he’s blocked her use of their credit cards, Jane gets an earful from the man himself.  She then composes an apologetic email to him; the man at the desk next to hers suggests tweaking the text then smiles and tells Jane not to worry about it:  the reassurance is accompanied by an encouraging pat.  Even when they’re not being predators and/or otherwise bastards, men can’t keep their hands to themselves.  The HR man’s name, though I didn’t hear it mentioned, turns out to be Wilcock.  In the context of this film, the name sounds, to British ears at least, symbolic.

    Almost needless to say, most critics have praised The Assistant.  Kitty Green is dealing with a widespread systemic scandal that doubtless persists, even if #MeToo has made a difference.  To disparage the film can seem to be denying the cultural reality of the power structures – their abuses and pernicious effects – that are at the heart of the piece.  It’s a poor movie, for all that – mostly monotonous and, on the rare occasions that Green tries to supply background or move the story along, unconvincing.  Not long into her working day, Jane steps out of the office for a couple of minutes to phone her mother.  Jane initiates this contact, from which she learns that it was her father’s birthday the previous day, which she forgot.  Her mother asks if she can phone her father after work that evening.  Jane says she will and keeps her word, though it’s late in the day when she finally gets out of work.  When she phones her father from a fast-food eatery, he makes a few bland remarks before quickly drawing the conversation to a close because he needs to take the dog for a walk.  He asks Jane to phone at the weekend:  he and his wife want to ‘hear all about’ her new job.  Does this mean she hasn’t called them before during the last five weeks?  If so, how come she decided to take time out of a hectic work schedule to phone home that morning?  This is a clumsy way of showing how much her gruesome job is absorbing Jane’s time and mind though perhaps for Green the father’s lack of interest in talking to his daughter is another point scored against patriarchy.

    A more serious weakness of the film is exposed in Jane’s visit to HR:  Green can’t choose between two different approaches to her material and tries to force them together.  On the one hand, she’s attracted to compression of events into a single working day – to give the narrative a quasi-‘real time’ charge and, I suspect, obviate the difficulty of exploring the protagonist more thoroughly.  On the other, she wants to convey the cumulative impact of the pathological workplace on Jane.   The advent of Sienna, whom the boss has installed in a nearby hotel, is the last straw that sends Jane to HR.  From what we know about who she is (not much, admittedly), she doesn’t seem impulsive yet this action is just that.  She doesn’t make a prior appointment with HR; she just walks in and gets to see Wilcock immediately.  Once their interview is underway, Jane falls to pieces.  His intentionally disarming questioning succeeds in making it sound as if her complaint is motivated by resentment of the new arrival rather than concern about what’s going on.   High-flying Northwestern graduate she may be but Jane can’t manage to tell Wilcock that, for example, the boss’s taking time out on ‘personal’ business with Sienna means that he missed an appointment with overseas clients.  Green wants us to see Jane wilting in the face of Wilcock’s relatively sophisticated form of bullying.  The scene made this viewer feel it was the writer-director, rather than the smooth HR apparatchik, who was stacking the deck.

    This episode is the highlight of The Assistant, even so.  It’s not a long film, only eighty-five minutes, but it wouldn’t lose much at an hour less than that – it would be better as a fifteen-minute short comprising nothing but the interview.  That would get rid of the protracted description of Jane’s soul-destroying office routines.  If she arrived to see Wilcock without our knowing anything about her, there’d be no danger of her acting out of character.  Most of what we learn about Jane emerges in the HR conversation – where she was educated, her prior employment history, how long she’s been with the company, her ambition to be a film producer.  This exchange, on its own, would be enough to raise the powerful predator theme and to show, through Wilcock’s cunning destruction of Jane’s resistance and the chilling reassurance of his parting shot (‘Don’t worry – you’re not his type’), the boss’s penetrating malign influence on organisational culture.

    That last point could be made with more startling impact if Jane’s HR interviewer were a woman but that was clearly unthinkable for Green.  The mogul’s outrageous behaviour is common knowledge.  It goes without saying that the male staff are complicit in it but what about the other women in the place?   In dramatising (for want of a better word) the silencing of a woman who dares to speak, Green herself silences the other female employees.  There’s a real positive in the HR person being a man, though – Matthew Macfadyen’s performance enlivens and lifts The Assistant for a few minutes.  Julia Garner plays Jane with impressive consistency and concentration but has little scope for developing her characterisation:  the scene with Wilcock is her only opportunity to spark with another actor.  Macfadyen seems to get better and better.  He shone as the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? legend Charles Ingram in last month’s ITV entertaining though evasive mini-series Quiz, showing a fine comic deftness (as well as a degree of empathy that Ingram probably didn’t deserve).  As Wilcock, Macfadyen is subtly incisive.  His pushing the tissues towards Jane is a case in point:  a seemingly sensitive gesture is rendered utterly perfunctory.

    Perhaps it’s not surprising, given the area she herself works in, that Green chose to set her story in a film production company, even though sexual harassment and worse has, in the last few years, been more exposed in the entertainment industry than any other – and Green claims that she ‘wanted any woman to be able to relate to the character and her experiences’.  In her rave review accompanying their S&S interview, Nikki Baughan claims that Kitty Green ‘devastatingly … lays bare the fears that come with being made to feel like a voiceless, helpless, insignificant woman in an aggressively male environment’.  You wonder what Baughan expected The Assistant to reveal.  Plenty of other reviews refer to Jane having ‘recently landed her dream job’.   This information must have been included in press notes for the film because no one could infer it from what’s on screen.  Jane looks thoroughly oppressed from the start of her working day.  What follows is little more than a drearily unrelenting vindication of her tense, unsmiling face.

    2 May 2020

  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ronald Neame (1969)

    Ronald Neame, whose first 1960s film was Tunes of Glory, returned to Scotland for his last work of the decade.  I’d seen The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie only once before, in my mid-teens, a year or two after its original release (an Odeon double-bill – those were the days – with Midnight Cowboy).  I looked forward to revisiting it and, of course, to seeing the streets of Edinburgh on screen, especially as I may not get to them in real life in 2020.  But this adaptation of Muriel Spark’s best-known novel – famous in its own right, for Maggie Smith’s celebrated, Oscar-winning performance – hasn’t aged at all well.  The tone manages to be overemphatic yet uncertain.  (Rod McKuen’s pleasant theme song, which he sings over the closing titles, suggests he had no idea what was going on in the film.)  The main problems are the construction of Jay Presson Allen’s script and Neame’s limitations as a director of actors.

    Allen, who would go on to write the screenplay for Cabaret, had adapted Spark’s novel for the stage a few years previously, simplifying the novel’s narrative.  The story is set in the 1930s at the fictional Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, where the eccentric, charismatic Jean Brodie largely eschews the formal curriculum that she despises.  She informs her class instead about her own romantic history, her holidays in Italy, her favourite artists and fascist leaders, especially Mussolini.  She intends, she says, to educate her girls according to the original Latin meaning of the word – to ‘lead out … what is already there’.  (The shared etymology of education and Il Duce is hard to ignore.)  She would be an imposing character in any context.  But on stage or screen, where her personality isn’t filtered through her pupils’ perspectives the way it is in the novel, her flamboyant gift of the gab makes Miss Brodie more conspicuously a star turn.

    The play also reduces from six to four the number of pupils in her class who become the teacher’s chosen ones.  Allen discards the character of Eunice Gardiner.  She turns Jenny Gray and Rose Stanley into a single composite character called Jenny.  She also makes a composite of Mary Macgregor and Joyce Emily Hammond, and calls her Mary.  This last adjustment is the most significant.  In the novel, Joyce Emily isn’t one of the elite Brodie set but becomes a separate project of Miss Brodie, who urges her to go and fight for the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War.  Joyce Emily is killed in Spain when the train she’s travelling on is attacked.  The reader learns that Mary died in a hotel fire several years after leaving school.

    Miss Mackay, headmistress of Marcia Blaine, makes persistent attempts to get rid of the flagrantly non-conformist Miss Brodie and, at one point, tries to extract some incriminating evidence about her from Mary Macgregor, ‘thinking her to be gullible and bribable, and underrating her stupidity’.  In Allen’s version, Mary’s personality is largely unchanged from the novel but it’s she, instead of Emily Joyce, who follows Miss Brodie’s advice to join Franco’s forces.  By having a stammering dimwit like Mary pay with her life for her mentor’s irresponsible exploitation, Allen makes that even more unforgivable.

    At the same time, Allen is intent on making her protagonist a victim too – brought low by the small-minded status quo represented by Miss Mackay, and thanks to the ‘treachery’ of another member of Miss Brodie’s crème de la crème, Sandy Stranger.  The novel itself isn’t free of this conflict:  Muriel Spark could be won over by the comic monsters she created (the title character in The Abbess of Crewe, for example); besides, Jean Brodie was inspired by her own most memorable teacher at James Gillespie’s School for Girls in Edinburgh.  But Spark’s spare, continuously prose is discombobulating – you always understand what she’s saying but are never sure what she feels about it – and this authorial voice has no equivalent in Jay Presson Allen’s reworking.  Her screenplay demands a director agile enough to sustain a high-wire balancing act, and Ronald Neame isn’t up to the job.

    Though a far from inexperienced screen actress, Maggie Smith hadn’t previously had a lead film role of anything like this magnitude.  If you didn’t know the facts before seeing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, you’d likely assume that Smith had already played the part on stage.  Even allowing that the character herself is a performer, Smith acts with a decisive confidence that sometimes gives the impression of a performance worked out in the theatre.  Her technical skill and distinctiveness, both physical and vocal, are such that Neame, who was well used to working with thespian royalty, seems to stand back and let Smith do her technically elaborate thing – rather as he was enthralled by Alec Guinness in Tunes of Glory.

    For me, Smith’s finest film performance is in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, where her eccentricity is a matter of incorrigible fact rather than theatrical bravura so I wasn’t surprised to be most impressed by her Jean Brodie in scenes where she’s angry and upset – and where Jean’s obliviousness comes through piercingly.  These interludes seem disconnected, though, from Miss Brodie’s more typical behaviour.  Much of the time, Smith is so on top of her line readings and comic effects that the actress’s intentionality bleeds into the character:  Smith makes you feel Jean knows precisely what she’s doing and the result is somewhat alienating.  The part had actually been played on the London stage by Vanessa Redgrave and, although she might not have saved this film, I rather wish she hadn’t turned it down.

    Most of the supporting roles are well enough played individually – but that’s the problem.  Ronald Neame can’t get things going between his actors.  They frequently give the impression of performing in isolation; what someone else is doing in the scene they’re in seems to make no difference.  This doesn’t matter with Ann Way in the virtually silent role of Miss Gaunt, the school secretary:  it’s a self-contained turn and Way, with her extraordinary mouse-like features and scuttling movements, does it to fine, sinister effect.  It’s less of an issue, too, in the case of actors as experienced as Robert Stephens and Gordon Jackson, who play the heroine’s polar-opposite lovers.

    Stephens is Teddy Lloyd, the art master and a married, nominally Catholic father-of-six.  Although Jean Brodie had only a brief fling with Lloyd, its aftermath is more enduring.  In his studio, where he paints portraits of his wife and children and, in due course, members of the Brodie set, they all end up looking like Jean.  Stephens is particularly good in his early scenes:  he gives Lloyd a vivid, irritable offhandedness, whether he’s arguing with Jean or snapping at a class of girls giggling at art history nudity and his naming of parts.  (Maggie Smith is emotionally freer in her scenes with Stephens, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that they were married at the time.)   As Jean’s other suitor, the music teacher Gordon Lowther, Jackson is a painful confusion of timid and hearty.  In capturing the character so well, however, he exposes the implausibility of the Lowther-Brodie romance.  This man would run a mile from Maggie Smith’s formidable Jean.

    The predetermined playing is more noticeable with the quartet of girls – Pamela Franklin (Sandy) Jane Carr (Mary), Diane Grayson (Jenny) and Shirley Steedman (Monica).  They weren’t such seasoned pros (though none was a newcomer); besides, it’s crucial for the Brodie set to have a group dynamic, and that is conspicuous by its absence.  Another difficulty with the girls was harder to avoid.  The novel follows them through their time at Marcia Blaine from the ages of ten to seventeen; they’re in Miss Brodie’s class only until they’re twelve but their identity as ‘her’ girls persists throughout the senior school.  The starting point of the story – 1932 – appears on the screen at the start of the film.  In a picture rarely averse to labouring the point, it’s a shame that Neame didn’t put up a ‘Two years later’ notice to make clear when the girls start what is formally their post-Brodie schooling.  All four actresses concerned were verging on twenty.  They pass for younger and, with the help of changing hairstyles, do age in the course of the film but – except for Jane Carr’s Mary, with her moon face and emphatic naivete – they never seem pre-adolescent.

    This is particularly true of Pamela Franklin as Sandy, the film’s most challenging role:  any actress would be hard put to make a success of it but Franklin (memorably excellent as the child Flora in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents eight years previously) gives it a good go.  Miss Brodie tells the plain, bespectacled Sandy she has ‘insight’ but that the prettier, more pliant Jenny has the ‘instinct’ that Sandy lacks:  it’s Jenny, Miss Brodie prophesies, who will be a ‘great lover’, indeed, will become Teddy Lloyd’s lover.  He does Jenny’s portrait but it’s Sandy with whom he has an affair and who poses naked for his painting of her.  The clever, calculating Sandy’s transition into an artist’s mistress and model was, in more ways than one, a tough ask of Pamela Franklin, and she manages it admirably.  But her lengthy showdown dialogues with both Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith are prime examples of Ronald Neame’s failure to sustain a current between actors.  His treatment of Sandy’s eventual disloyalty to Miss Brodie doesn’t make sense even according to the screenplay’s reworking of it.

    When Sandy sees a newspaper report of Mary’s death in Spain, her first thought isn’t to expose Jean as indirectly responsible but to break the news to her.  She rushes to her flat, up the stairs, and, out of breath, knocks desperately on the door.  Miss Brodie is at home but washing her hair and doesn’t hear.  It’s only in the wake of her appalling speech to Mary’s fellow pupils – ‘Mary Macgregor died a heroine – it was her intention to fight for Franco against the forces of darkness’ – that Sandy thinks again.  Yet in the final face-off between her and Miss Brodie, Neame seems to want the audience to see Sandy as a spiteful little sneak.  As she walks away and Jean yells ‘Assassin!’ in her direction, the word echoes melodramatically on the soundtrack, and Sandy looks back as if to admit the accusation.  Without the intervening sequence in which she tries so hard, and in such distress, to tell Miss Brodie the news about Mary, it might have been possible to believe that Sandy was taking revenge for the fact that, even when she modelled nude for Lloyd, he turned her into Jean on canvas.  But that dash upstairs – perhaps Neame thought a bit of running would make things briefly cinematic – makes this interpretation impossible, makes it outrageous that Sandy is presented as the villain of the piece.

    Muriel Spark’s use of flash-forward conveys Miss Brodie’s variable long-term impact on her girls.  Rose ‘shook off Miss Brodie’s influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat’.  The adult Sandy is a different matter.  She becomes a nun and the author of a ‘strange book of psychology’ that brings her ‘so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille more desperately than ever’.  Asked by one such visitor to the convent about the main influences of her schooldays – ‘Were they literary or political or personal?  Was it Calvinism?’ – Sandy replies (this is the novel’s last line):  ‘There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime’.

    The decision to jettison flash-forward is a signal of where the film-makers’ priorities lie:  a purely linear narrative makes for minimal interference with the Jean Brodie show.  But it still seems a weakening omission that the film doesn’t show what difference Miss Brodie makes immediately to her chosen few, who are rarely shown in relation to the non-elect members of the class.  Apart from Sandy and Jenny’s funny and accomplished forged love letter from Miss Brodie to Mr Lowther, there’s little to suggest that her special girls are notably daring or imaginative.  They seem, rather, to behave as bright, mildly precocious schoolgirls might be expected to behave.  All that makes them special is how they’re used and, as a twenty-first century audience is bound to see it, abused by adults.  The idea of the Brodie set accompanying Jean on her weekends to stay and sleep with Lowther is probably as hard for many modern viewers to accept as it is for Miss Mackay.  Miss Brodie’s prediction of which of her girls will become Lloyd’s lover and his different choice in realising the matter now seem beyond the pale.

    Celia Johnson’s Miss Mackay – with her determined self-control, spinsterly defensiveness and ever-increasing preoccupation with getting Miss Brodie dismissed – is the film’s most coherent characterisation.  Miss Mackay is the embodiment of narrow-minded propriety, right down to Johnson’s nicely restrained hand movements.  (These contrast with, yet compete with, Maggie Smith’s histrionic gestures.)  Yet the eventual success, thanks to Sandy’s ‘betrayal’, of Miss Mackay’s campaign has an effect that Neame and Allen probably didn’t (and Muriel Spark certainly didn’t) intend.  From a fifty-years-on perspective, at least, it’s a struggle to see the denouement in terms of repressive conservatism extinguishing a beacon of individualism and originality.  You’re more likely to feel that Jean Brodie was a menace – a bizarre egomaniac who shouldn’t have been entrusted with children’s education.  In any sense of the word.

    28 April 2020

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