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
