Review: 'The Assistant' is a riveting thriller and a rallying cry for the #MeToo movement

It is difficult to think of a movie that is so much of its moment, that crystalizes the issues and voices the concerns, quite like writer-director Kitty Green’s “The Assistant,” the first necessary movie of the #MeToo generation.

In scarcely 90 minutes, Green and her star, the frightening talented Julia Garner, itemize the evils of powerful men who use their positions to dominate, assault and rape women — and also the systems and underlings who, through snickering or silence, allow such horrific behavior to continue.

Garner plays Jane (that’s what it says in the credits; nobody uses her, or pretty much anyone else’s, name in dialogue), an entry-level employee at a New York-based movie production company. (Comparisons to Miramax or The Weinstein Company are, officially, coincidental — but, unofficially, clear as day but not the point.) She is an assistant to the company’s boss, who is never seen and only occasionally heard through berating phone calls.

Jane must carry out the most mundane duties: Making coffee, running the copier, scheduling the boss’ itinerary and travel, tidying up his office, and so on. Sometimes the duties are tougher, like fielding calls from the boss’s irate wife (Stéphanye Dussad), or picking up a stray earring off the boss’s floor, or making sure a new employee — a pretty off-the-bus waitress (Kristine Froseth) the boss met on a trip to Sun Valley — gets to the hotel for which the company is paying.

The office’s male assistants (Jon Orsini and Noah Robbins) ignore the clear signs of sexual misconduct, and only aid Jane with writing apologetic emails to the boss when he chews her out. A visit with the HR director (Matthew Macfadyen) to report her suspicions only leads to warnings of career suicide, with the nicest thing he can say being, “Don’t worry — you’re not his type.”

Green (who played with the documentary form in fascinating ways to explore tabloid headlines and a Colorado mystery in “Casting JonBenet”) makes a sure-footed leap into narrative film here. She piles on the mundane details of Jane’s first-in, last-out job, all crammed into one day, to showcase the battle within Jane’s heart — the mental and moral struggle between keeping her job, and thus being complicit in the boss’s mistreatment of women, and trying to do something about it.

All these complex, contradictory emotions all play out on Garner’s subtly expressive face. So do Jane’s efforts to keep her emotions in check, lest they be used against her by the company’s male co-workers, from her falsely friendly office mates to the intimidating HR guy all the way up to the boss himself. Garner gives a quietly heartbreaking performance, as a woman trying to hold onto her moral compass when everything around her is uncaring or downright hostile.

And saying “The Assistant” is an important movie, an urgent warning to predatory men that their days are numbered, shouldn’t distract from how tightly constructed it is. Green plays the tense, discordant notes of her story like a concert pianist, making even an innocent-looking tissue box seem sinister, and the result is as much a nail-biter as a call to arms.

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‘The Assistant’

★★★1/2

Opened January 31 in select cities; opening Friday, February 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language. Running time: 87 minutes.