Watched this on Hulu and really appreciated it. It's basically a day-in-the-life of an assistant named Jane, played wonderfully by Julia Garner, who serves a never-shown Weinstein-ish entertainment mogul who verbally abuses her on phone calls while using his position as an advantage towards the doing of sordid things off-screen with a variety of women.
The film's restraint and very pure observational stance is part of why it works so well, but maybe could have used a touch more impact in a few scenes outside of a centerpiece scene where Garner goes to HR with intentions of filing a complaint (a crushing moment in the film, to be sure). I think the end in particular is a case where the film has a few moments but can't seem to hit on the arc it wants, or figure out if it even wants an arc.
The other creative choice, too, that seems to have been a tough one was how long the assistant has been working for the company. They make it a very brief period of time (5 weeks) yet it seems like she knows her job all too well and is fairly jaded to the experience, it's just when a new assistant girl from Idaho comes to work right there in the office with them (after staying in a hotel that the boss man visits for a few hours) that Jane feels the need to do something. So I saw it as a kind of "straw that broke the camel's back" when she goes to the HR guy because I thought there would be this mountain of instances she would be carrying with her, but instead it was just everything we had already seen. But then again, the way the assistant is portrayed, you don't really believe that a person of her character would have been able to put up with this situation for more than a few months, nor should she have or kept quiet for long... so yeah, it's a tricky spot they had there in terms of the background and context to the narrative. Obviously this is a hybrid story based on the true stories of many assistants and women, so you have to be sensitive to the fact that this might closely reflect the reality of a few of those stories.
But Garner is great at portraying the soul-suck of this job and, again, I loved the methodical approach and how lived-in the film felt, which makes its quiet indictments that much more affecting even if it's stuck in a corner then where the main character can't have much agency. Which I suppose, too, is part of the point since she is "just" The Assistant.
The film's restraint and very pure observational stance is part of why it works so well, but maybe could have used a touch more impact in a few scenes outside of a centerpiece scene where Garner goes to HR with intentions of filing a complaint (a crushing moment in the film, to be sure). I think the end in particular is a case where the film has a few moments but can't seem to hit on the arc it wants, or figure out if it even wants an arc.
The other creative choice, too, that seems to have been a tough one was how long the assistant has been working for the company. They make it a very brief period of time (5 weeks) yet it seems like she knows her job all too well and is fairly jaded to the experience, it's just when a new assistant girl from Idaho comes to work right there in the office with them (after staying in a hotel that the boss man visits for a few hours) that Jane feels the need to do something. So I saw it as a kind of "straw that broke the camel's back" when she goes to the HR guy because I thought there would be this mountain of instances she would be carrying with her, but instead it was just everything we had already seen. But then again, the way the assistant is portrayed, you don't really believe that a person of her character would have been able to put up with this situation for more than a few months, nor should she have or kept quiet for long... so yeah, it's a tricky spot they had there in terms of the background and context to the narrative. Obviously this is a hybrid story based on the true stories of many assistants and women, so you have to be sensitive to the fact that this might closely reflect the reality of a few of those stories.
But Garner is great at portraying the soul-suck of this job and, again, I loved the methodical approach and how lived-in the film felt, which makes its quiet indictments that much more affecting even if it's stuck in a corner then where the main character can't have much agency. Which I suppose, too, is part of the point since she is "just" The Assistant.
