The Assistant (2019, Kitty Green) (Patreon)

56/100

Bailed on this the first time, nearly a year ago, and lo and behold there's a record of why, preserved in my comment to a friend's review:

I assume I’m one of the people referenced above (along with Waz), so let me note that this film didn’t push my victim button at all. I just found it incredibly bland, both formally and dramatically. None of Green’s choices (DISCLAIMER: in the first half hour) seemed interesting to me, with the microaggression aspect not remotely as acute as the first act of Get Out (the part of that film I love) and the corporate process aspect just...blah, imo. It’s possible that watching the whole thing would make what I saw more retroactively compelling—certainly that’s true of, say, Oleanna’s first act (onstage)—but usually if nothing has impressed me a third of the way in, it’s a lost cause. Though the Tom Wambsgans scene does sound like it could be pretty great. Anyway point is I wasn’t put off by miserabilism or anything. Just did not see what folks are excited about.

Having now watched the entire film—it placed highly enough in year-end critics' polls that I felt obligated to give it a proper chance—I can report that doing so did in fact make the first third more retroactively compelling, in a way that's essentially the flip side of Oleanna. That play, for those unfamiliar, involves accusations of sexual harassment, levied in act two and based entirely upon the seemingly innocuous (sometimes verging on tedious) conversation we witnessed in act one; Mamet apparently meant to fashion a cautionary tale about how easily innocent words can be warped by a zealot, but it works equally well—much better, actually, in my opinion—as a portrait of extreme subjectivity. In any case, what had seemed in the moment like faintly pointless dialogue retroactively takes on an entirely new meaning. Green does something similar (but also quite different) by placing Jane's futile visit to Human Resources smack in the middle of the movie, where it alters the film's "trajectory" not one iota. I'm still not particularly impressed by her as a formalist, apart from some first-rate ominous sound design (rumbling photocopiers, so forth), but it's clear to me now that the first half hour needs to be sort of mundane in order for the last half hour to feel truly disheartening. Specific lines or actions don’t get recoded—the entire workaday banality does. So I'll concede that I misjudged the film's pre-HR efficacy. That's the inherent danger of the W/O, which I've always recognized (and that's exactly why I wind up revisiting a few W/O's every year).

But! Now I have a huge, film-crippling problem with the HR scene itself—specifically, with Wilcock's (cute name) disproportionate response to Jane's complaint. For a while, their interaction is gratifyingly complex, with Jane struggling to articulate what she perceives as a glaringly obvious abuse of power and Wilcock seemingly—and plausibly, given that he hasn't been watching the movie, as we have—uncertain exactly what it is she's accusing their mutual boss of having done. "When I found out I came straight here," she explains, well into the conversation. "Sorry, what did you find out?" he asks...and the thing is, she doesn't have a ready answer, even though we understand exactly why she's there. That's quite incisive, getting at the difficulty of taking action before learned indifference sets in, when things are often still nebulous; had the discourse remained quizzically friendly, with Jane ultimately concluding (in the face of Wilcock's confusion) that she has no case to make, her subsequent return to the status quo would have really drawn blood (especially when you throw in her boss' flattery). Green, however, opts to condemn the system by flipping the switch on Wilcock, first having him blithely take a personal call even as Jane fights back tears and then abruptly shifting his register to openly villainous. Were The Assistant's toxic bigwig more blatantly Weinstein-esque—which is to say, had Jane seen and reported evidence of something non-consensual rather than just grotesquely transactional—Wilcock's ugly accusation of jealousy and implicit threat to ruin her career would make perfect sense. The vague suspicions she actually shows up with, however, provide him with plenty of cover—he could have dismissed them without resorting to that degree of mustache-twirling corruption, perhaps even got her to question her own compassionate impulses. Or, as I say, he could bring the hammer down as he does in response to a much more grave and irrefutable complaint. Green weds inchoate anxiety to institutional hardball, which feels like didactic overkill. And since the movie is deliberately structured with this scene as its pivot (or non-pivot, given that nothing of consequence happens as a result), that choice reverberates both backward and forward. 

Still, at least now I have a better sense of why others consider this film among last year's finest. And this time I caught a wonderful snatch of stray background dialogue that I'd missed the first time (which gets no context whatsoever, but will be instantly comprehensible to the credits-obsessed): "We can't give him an 'And.'"