102 Time February 3, 2020
REVIEW
Sugar and stress
on the lowest rung
By Stephanie Zacharek
movies abouT jobs and The Toll
they can take on the human psyche are
a tough sell. How do you dramatize fa-
tigue, anxiety and repressed ennui with-
out boring an audience to bits? The
best approach is to use an actor’s face to
carry the burden, which is what Kitty
Green does in her quietly harrowing
debut feature The Assistant, set during
one interminably stressful workday.
Julia Garner plays Jane, a recent col-
lege grad working an entry- level job
at a hip film- production outfit, which
evokes an earlier iteration of the Wein-
stein Co. The job comes with perks: in
the morning, there’s a car to pick her up
from her nondescript apartment build-
ing in Queens. But it shows up before
dawn, and, bundled into a caterpillar-
like scarf to fend off the cold, she grabs
a few more minutes of much needed
sleep in the back seat. Jane has to be the
first in the office, to turn on the lights,
to make the coffee, to tidy up around
her boss’s desk. She finds a woman’s
earring in his lair and places it discreetly
in her desk drawer; it’s part of her job to
look away from his questionable extra-
curricular activities.
Jane hopes to become a film producer,
but for now, she’s on the ladder’s bottom
rung. Two slightly more experienced col-
leagues (John Orsini and Noah Robbins)
show occasional kindness, but they also
radiate a malicious hope that she’ll fail,
listening in voyeuristically as the bully-
mogul boss berates her for something
that isn’t her fault. (He’s never seen,
though we hear his bark through the
phone.) Later, after a different blowup,
he’ll semiapologize to her with an email
that reeks of patronizing,
and sinister, control: “I’m
tough on you because I’m
gonna make you great.”There’s a #MeToo com-
ponent of The Assistant,
but that’s not the film’s
focus. Instead, Green—
director of the 2017
documentary Casting
JonBenet—captures the
jagged texture of the lives
of overworked millenni-
als and Gen Z-ers, though
anybody who has ever been pushed to
the point of exhaustion in an entry-
level gig will relate. For so many young
people, women in particular, workplaceexploitation is granular—you don’t
have to be the victim of outright sex-
ual assault or threats to be affected by
a higher-up’s bad behavior. Garner is
perfectly cast, a pixie of steel. You can
see by the stern set of Jane’s lips and by
the way, time and again, she just barely
represses an eye roll, that she’s tough
enough to handle all of
this—and yet she knows
she shouldn’t have to.
At the end of a workday,
stressed-out people often
crave a drink or a smoke.
Jane instead turns to carbs
and sugar, in the form of a
giant deli muffin that she
can’t even finish. It’s a tiny
flourish that cracks your
heart open. When you’re
young, everyone tells you
that you have to work hard
to get ahead. But how hard
is too hard, and what’s unreasonable?
The Assistant captures that shaky sliver
of youth when you don’t yet know the
answer to those questions. •TimeOff Movies
‘If we want
women in
power, the
entire system
needs to be
completely
stripped apart
and rebuilt.’
Director KITTY GREEN, in
Entertainment WeeklyTHE ASSISTANT: BLEECKER STREET; THE TRAITOR: SONY PICTURES CLASSICS; THE GENTLEMEN: CHRISTOPHER RAPHAEL
△
Garner endures the anxiety behind a
seemingly glamorous job
in The Assistant