Starring: Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Mackenzie Leigh, Kristine Froseth, Jon Orsini, Noah Robbins, and Stephanye Dussud
Distributor: Rialto Films
Runtime: 87 mins. Reviewed in May 2020
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This American fictional drama tells the story of a female Assistant who is employed by a powerful entertainment executive, and it follows her life on a single working day. The film is written, directed, co-produced and co-edited by Australian, Kitty Green.
Jane (Julia Garner) has just graduated from College, and ambitiously wants to be a film producer. She is thrilled to land a job as a junior assistant to an influential and powerful film executive, who plies his trade from an office in downtown Manhattan, New York. The movie offers a painstaking exploration of the way individual happenings in a toxic, unfriendly environment slowly accumulate in their significance, to dramatise harm in a devastatingly effective way. Jane’s employer has closed door meetings he calls “personal”, and he engages in sexually-toned profanities that Jane receives from him on her phone, and she sees evidence of his unpleasantness on her computer. But we never see him other than a blur, and his face is kept hidden. Nearly every conversation is about him, but we never learn his name, and no one is sexually assaulted on camera.
The film is a devastating portrayal of the abuse of power. In an extraordinarily impactful way, and obviously inspired by the #MeToo movement, Kitty Green explores how men in power use and abuse young women in the film industry, verbally and sexually.
Jane’s employer berates his employees, including Jane, never answers his wife’s calls, when she knows he is having affairs, but he always finds time to trade sexual favours for the advancement of the career-conscious women he chooses to seduce. What Jane doesn’t say in her work environment comes to be as significant as what she articulates. The tedious nature of her menial duties is boring, until the boredom escalates into fascination. Late in her day, Jane tries to make a complaint to Human Relations Director, Wilcock (Matthew Macfadyen), but nothing changes. In a pivotal and tensely unsettling scene, Wilcock communicates why things are never likely to change, and tells Jane she poses no threat, because she is not her “boss’s type”.
Julia Garner delivers a powerfully understated performance as Jane, who believes at first the situation cannot last. Everyone else in the office knows, however, that their advancement is premised on silently accepting the executive’s sexually predatory behaviour. Garner expresses Jane’s conflict in subtly delivered movements and gestures, that project the indignities she has to endure. Although we never see the offending executive, his presence is evident in nearly every scene. The viewer’s imagination is asked to fill the gap.
The fact that the offending Boss stays hidden is a powerful strategy adopted by Kitty Green that keeps offence and humiliation at the forefront of the film. Cognitive insights about the evil of sexual assault and harassment are not compromised in any way by variable reaction to explicitly offending visuals. Insidious abuse colours everything, however. Jane is asked to do her chores in what begins as an ordinary working day, but as Jane’s work goes on, the film starts to tell a very different story – there is a couch, for example, in the Boss’s office that constantly needs cleaning, and Jane wonders who owns the single earring she finds lying on the floor next to the couch.
This is a highly intelligent film, that tensely illustrates, with particularly impressive acting and clever direction, how easy it is for men in power to keep women under their control, and it very effectively projects the sinister nature of sexual harassment in the entertainment industry.
This is the film that “Bombshell” (2019) should have been, but isn’t. It hints all the time that something could be wrong, and the viewer is pushed to internalise the depth of the immorality that can exist in workplace environments. It further insightfully comments on the extent to which people in abusive environments may willingly, or unwillingly, be complicit in what is happening.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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