You're not his type

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Movies of 2020...

#8 : The Assistant

Drama that directly tackles the asymmetric employment power structure at the heart of the Weinstein scandal and the MeToo movement, with Julia Garner as the young woman who is the unconscious enabler of her abusive boss.

Another film I am aware of but have not seen - I've heard good things about it but it was on the "should watch, but probably won't get round to" list.  It feels a very "Guardian" film, but I'm expecting to enjoy it nonetheless.

And well, it's basically a young lady having a shitty day in a shitty office.  And well, that's pretty much it.  She gets in very early, does a load of crappy jobs, interacts with various people (nearly all of whom are incredibly unpleasant) and then goes home.

There are some interesting film-making techniques involved - particularly, the storytelling mechanism which involves the use of a lot of short scenes.  Very few of them last any longer than 30 seconds but they do a good job in building up the overall picture.  It also uses interesting camera and lighting work - odd angles and odd movement are involved which add to the overall claustrophobic nature of the film.  

On the small scale, I'd say the film is well written with a lot of the scenes doing a good job of conveying some aspect of unpleasantness extremely effectively.  It also does well to shoehorn a lot of various such scenes into the course of one day - although I would say that choice of structure left me uncertain as to whether any lessons were ever going to be learned here or whether we were more in Groundhog Day territory.  And possibly that's intended, either to get you to think further about the various issues it raises or as a reflection on society as a whole - but personally I was left feeling somewhat dissatisfied.

Julia Garner is very good as Jane - as I said, I wasn't entirely convinced by her voyage of discovery throughout the course of one day, but she does her best to sell it to me.  Matthew MacFadyen is also good as the wilfully obtuse head of HR - although I struggle to imagine the firm has a great deal of use for an HR department (except for signing off the hush money for harassment cases).

It's interesting that The Guardian says it tackles the "asymmetric employment power structure" because as far as I can see, it doesn't really tackle anything.  All it really does is document one example of it - yes, it's a horrible situation, but I'm not sure how many people are going to watch this and say either "wow - I never even considered that some people behaved that way" or "you know what - I really must stop behaving that way".  It also feels harsh to claim she's "the unconscious enabler of her abusive boss" - the way it's depicted the whole system is set up that way and personally, I feel it would have been nice for things to have been a little more ambiguous with a bit more light and shade involved.  Unfortunately, the situation is (as it is for a lot of people, I suspect) "if you want this job, then you put up with whatever is going on".

So, overall, I liked the film but more from a stylistic point of view than from a storytelling point of view.  I feel the critics may have gone overboard with their praise of it because they didn't feel they could criticise it in the wake of Weinstein and MeToo.  I, however, am not known for going overboard with my praise - I think the film marks Kitty Green out as a film-maker to watch (she wrote, directed, edited and produced this) but I also think there's room for improvement here.

At the time of writing, it's available to watch on all the usual channels - it's certainly worth a watch but I don't think it's the ground-breaking work that the critics thought (and yes, I appreciate that there will be many varied opinions on the film depending upon life experiences).

#9 - A film that's so good, it's bad
#7 - A very, very good film