In the modern age, there have been few narratives as prominent as The Me Too Movement. This is largely thanks to people speaking up about their oppressors, pointing out various forms of harassment that include physical, mental, and sexual. The goal of bringing attention to these travesties is to hopefully make the work environment a safer place and, in some ways, has already been doing an effective job of making that a reality. Even then, there’s room to grow as the conversation expands to include even more perspectives, hopefully making the next generation a less troubling one.
With The Me Too Movement now a few years old, one has to wonder what forms of expression have been made. While some can see it symbolically in the trials of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, there are others who use cinema to express themselves, reflecting these situations’ uncomfortableness in ways that make their perspective clearer. Where testimonies can recount the horror, sometimes seeing it allows these moments to radiate stronger, making you able to empathize in ways that the spoken word sometimes can’t.
That is part of the draw of The Assistant (2020). The Sundance drama is the latest to detail workplace harassment. It’s also one of the few to do it in understated ways. The majority of the story doesn’t use conventional narrative like large monologues and melodrama to accentuate the awfulness of men with power. Everything is seen on the periphery of the titular assistant Jane (Julia Garner), doing everything to appease her boss’ lush lifestyle in the movie industry while not getting fired. When it’s revealed that an attractive woman with less experience than her is getting better treatment, she decides to confront her boss, unnamed, and finds how horrible the industry is. It’s not just the men who work in the office. Even the boss is horrible.
While the character has no name and bestows very little visual similarities to him, many have argued that this is designed as a drama about Harvey Weinstein. By now his frivolous accounts of sexual harassment are well-known, giving enough feedback to make any sensationalized recounting feel tamer than the real thing. Director Kitty Green hasn’t given any official say on how much is Weinstein, though it’s possibly more haunting because of his vagueness, reflecting a figure that is more than one man in the industry over the past several decades.
This is all to say that Jane spends the entire film as an observer. At no point does her boss run a hand up her skirt. There is no uncomfortable monologue as the music swells. All there is is naturalism that is designed more to reflect the day in the life of an assistant, someone who never gets to have the joy of her boss but is complicit in giving him those opportunities. She learns languages, runs errands, and deals with men by the elevator trying to remember which European city they got wasted in. Jane may be simple, but she is surrounded by an elitism that feels comfortable doing prank phone calls on company time, asking Jane to relax and not worry so much about ethical dilemmas.
In an abstract sense, you could even argue that The Assistant’s first act is a silent film. Nothing of significance happens to Jane. She is merely performing operations, driving into New York when the moon is still out to start the day of laborious e-mails and phone calls. While she says words, none of it feels consequential to the themes of the story. Everything is more implicit, existing more like a snapshot of the discomfort that women face. It doesn’t need to tell you why this moment of her at a desk is oppressing. You just need to hear coworkers off-screen, failing upwards, hitting all of the familiar themes of office misconduct. They’re not reprimanded. Things just exist, and it helps us to understand Jane’s struggle.
A simple trip to the elevator is even more telling. Without addressing anything, the weight of her standing opposite of her sleazy coworkers makes you worry for her. What does she know about him that isn’t being said? There is a tension at this moment, doing everything to not lose her job by playing the nice girl. Even then, what is to stop some small transgression from going down? Even as nothing happens, the audience is given reason to feel dread. Jane has sacrificed so much for her job, and all it’s done is make her feel lesser.
Whereas The Assistant is a movie with vague ties to reality, Bombshell (2019) is a story that is more designed to be ripped from the headlines. Whereas Kitty Green refuses to give titles to many signifiers, director Jay Roach has no choice but to tie it to figures that everyone knows. Even if it’s not a movie production company office, the location is one that’s constantly designed to present messages to the public.
Fox News remains one of the more notorious information networks currently on the air, presenting sensationalized views of the news. The largely conservative channel has come under scrutiny for a variety of reasons, though the most noteworthy one came in light of The Me Too Movement.
The story focuses on a series of female anchors, though most specifically Megyn Kelly, as they take on their boss Roger Ailes. The road to relief is one paved with insight that is frankly on the obvious side. This is as much a story about how Fox News sexualized their anchors as it is Ailes being a creeper. There are whole scenes dedicated to reflecting how the camera shoots women’s legs to make them more attractive, or how news stories cause them to be called such offensive terms like bitch. It even gets into how Kelly was stuck in a misogynist tirade with the future president (and all because she gave brief criticism of him).
In all respects, there is nothing wrong with this being explored. It’s all true to the accounts. Roach clearly did some research. He is putting in details that should feel vital because of how important they are to this moment. In a time where people are still bringing sexual assault allegations public, Bombshell should feel so much more vital than it does.
So why does it feel like things come up short? The simple answer is that Roach is not terribly interested in the depth of these characters. So long as you think that sexual harassment is bad and should be punished, you’ll come out the other side feeling satisfied. Bad men were punished. Isn’t that a relief that these women don’t have to deal with it anymore?
This is all pageantry with a thick layer of melodrama over it. What we have here is a story so ripped from the headlines that it puts ideas before any emotional weight underneath. There is no room for subtlety. If something looks bad, you best believe that it’s bad. This isn’t a story like Spotlight (2015) where there are push and pull of ideas, questioning ethics on the road to presenting a prescient story. Bombshell wants to be part of that class so badly that it forgets to do anything with Charlize Theron’s impeccable Kelly impersonation. We just get moments that the audience knows well, never questioning a greater value of how this emotionally informs the women being harassed.
It thinks that it cares by directly addressing it, but it comes from somebody who clearly never had to deal with The Me Too Movement. They’re sympathetic but never had to spend time with the women who were marginalized, their careers compromised for shady practices. By the end, we don’t know all that much about Kelly or the other women. Even if it’s considered taboo that one is a lesbian (an interesting idea given her conservative employers), there’s no catharsis for bringing this up.
If you want to know why The Assistant succeeds where Bombshell fades, it’s the understanding of their protagonists. While it has everything to do with workplace harassment, it’s never entirely about the action itself. It’s the lingering dread that comes with being there, the fear that one mishap can throw an entire day off course. The Assistant knows that Jane doesn’t need to be groped or sexualized to be a victim. All she needs is to have her opinion marginalized, to have men objectifying others in front of her. The sense of inadequacy in the quietness is crucial to Jane’s ultimate disappointment.
Her boss just happens to exist as the concluding reality. He is the one with the most lines in the movie, and it’s easy to see why. He has the thesis in the subtext. He doesn’t care that a more attractive woman is getting incentives. He panders to Jane’s desire to be a film producer, believing that they’re needed. The audience knows that none of this is true. We don’t need to be told that her boss is being disingenuous. All that we get is an uncertainty of what happens next because it’s clear that Jane isn’t getting a promotion for doing the right thing. She’s just another cog in this awful system.
Meanwhile, for Bombshell, we NEED to know how awful Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) is. He looks ugly and decrepit. He talks like a pervert. Everything about him makes him seem fit for a fantasy film, possibly directed by Jim Henson. Ailes isn’t a real person. He’s an altruist filmmaker’s view of evil, and it makes everything he does obviously. We don’t need to see the hand on the knee to know he’s a bad man. Five seconds with him and you know where you stand. It’s not subtle and is frankly terrible world-building.
The ambiguity of the boss in The Assistant presents something more in line with reality. He’s attractive enough of a boss, more likely to talk to his male cohorts instead of Jane as she sits in the waiting room. There is a sense of her male colleagues passing her by on the way up, sometimes literally. The boss never outright dismisses her opinion, but it’s clear how much he doesn’t care.
You don’t need to present a dramatized scene of sexual harassment to convey it. In Bombshell, the audience is forced to watch Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie) as she deals with Ailes. The music grows dramatic and Pospisil’s face grows weary. This is a fair way to respond to the moment, but it lacks any complicated or necessary subtext that hasn’t already been established. It’s all just creepy for creepy’s sake. It’s basically saying that we can’t forward a woman’s narrative for workplace equality without seeing them disgraced, forced to play a victim who cries like a 1940’s damsel in distress.
Bombshell can’t end like The Assistant. Even if both are intended to reflect similar discrimination, the latter shows something even more complicated. Jane leaves her job without any major work conflict. She isn’t groped by a Muppet. However, we understand her more emotionally than anyone in Bombshell. It’s an insular narrative that shows every cut slowly making her (and the audience) more uncomfortable. You feel hopeless that change will ever come, and it doesn’t. The only thing that does is Jane’s career. Bombshell has to act like they’ve been through a sexual harassment war zone to make their big moment have any catharsis, and because of that feels more generic, like she’s Norma Rae fighting for wage inequality and not something genuinely more problematic.
At the end of the day, that’s the issue. Bombshell is a cynical take on The Me Too Movement that things because it knows what happens that it should be given Oscar bait privileges. It doesn’t say anything new or rewarding about its subject, just getting by as a document of a moment that is far less insightful than the news stories it’s based on. The Assistant makes you feel the weight of being a woman in an oppressive industry, making you feel like doing the right thing will not be rewarded. It doesn’t need real names or high production values to be great. It just needs to make you feel claustrophobic, creeped out by things that never reveal their true selves to you. It’s terrible because we recognize it as such. You don’t really need to be told that, at least I hope not.
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