Saw the movie The Assistant last night (Hulu) and offer the following observation: an excellent and understated exploration of sexual harassment in the workplace and the larger issue of cultural male privilege as it relates to sexual predatory behavior. The film is wonderfully spare and economical as it chronicles a day in the life of an assistant to a movie mogul with Proustian attention to detail. The pace and tenor of the scrip reminds one of the 1952 classic, High Noon. Writer/director Kitty Green has, like Carl Foreman and Fred Zinnemann before her, created an insular world in which the moral dilemma of the protagonist (brilliantly played by Julia Garner) is revealed subtly without forced emphasis. Garner accomplishes this with an amazing ability to render her internal straggle to the audience largely non-verbally devoid of hyperbole or dramatic excess. This, in turn, allows the lean dialogue to have an even more permanent and meaningful effect. Another outstanding aspect of this film is the way in which sexual abuse/harassment is portrayed as part and parcel of a culture that has normalized and allowed for such wrongdoing to exist. The complicity of the mogul’s subordinates was shown with stunning nonchalance so as to underscore their participation in a such a system for preservation of their own professional survival. The upshot is that Green and Garner have teamed to present the everyday workings of a world in which the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Jeffery Epstein, et al have been allowed to continue their pernicious and evil practice relatively unchecked. The Assistant goes a long way to put these actions in their proper perspective and hopefully, in so doing, shine new light on an old and enduring societal problem.
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