Sunday, February 23, 2020

The Assistant (2019)

This important story of a movie producer's junior assistant, who slowly realizes her workplace is uglier than she thought, is growing on me. Its pace is languid, as the assistant fulfills mundane tasks but is alert to her surroundings in the course of a very long and tedious work day.

Julia Garner is in pretty much every scene and second-billed Matthew Macfadyen is in just one. Pay close attention and/or use the closed captions, because there's a lot of dialogue on the other end of a phone.

This is the feature fiction debut for director/writer Kitty Green (she's made three documentaries, one of which was a short, before this). Apparently she was inspired to make a #MeToo movie that didn't concentrate so much on the perpetrators, and we soon realize that we will not see the executive nor hear his name.

I cannot find the score by Tamar-Kali online anywhere, other than this Spotify playlist, which I'm pretty sure is from the imagination of a random Spotify user.

Garner was blogged in Grandma (which came before her Emmy-winning turn in Ozark--season three premiering in March) and Tamar-kali for Mudbound. Macfadyen plays one of the scumbags in the HBO series Succession, as well as dozens of other credits here and in his native England.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics, averaging 89%, are enthusiastic, while its audiences are hating at 22. Sometimes it's hard to be patient.

1 comment:

  1. Just watched this movie. I thought it was brilliant, though I’m sure most would be bored.

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