![]() ![]() We have had our share of horrible boss movies over the years. THE WORKING DREAD - My Review of THE ASSISTANT (4 Stars) The Assistant is a film made up of small, specific moments that - while not driving towards anything grand or set in stone - analyzes a culture gone awry lost to the conditions of those in power and where the idea of simple human decency quickly fades away. Green sets her film within the world of the film industry (a detail I initially thought was the wrong - or maybe too much the obvious - choice), but what saves this for general moviegoers is that Jane doesn't necessarily have to be working for a powerful Hollywood producer as this could easily transfer to any other corporate environment. In the similarly themed Promising Young Woman the style is more heightened, but the situations aren't - they're very real and regrettably commonplace - and The Assistant operates in this same area where everything that occurs feels oddly ordinary, unpleasantly familiar, and certainly possible. Garner has an amazing presence that translates almost everything we need to know about what the character is feeling without hardly saying a word. Nothing here feels exploitative for the sake of such despite the subject matter, but rather Green paints a delicate portrait of Julia Garner's Jane whom no one notices, but whose every internal conflict and struggle is all we see. There's no gratuitous and/or sensationalized scenes of what happens beyond closed doors, but instead we remain with a lowly clerk who makes copies, gets lunch, and tidies up after meetings. While a story of power and consent this is a story of power and consent told by and from the point of view of a woman. ![]() Song for a Raggy Boy was adapted from the memoir by Patrick Galvin, who also helped adapt his story for the screen.Smart enough to not focus on the person in question, but the machinery set-up around that person and those on the other side of his always closed door, Kitty Green's The Assistant is deliberate to a fault. Franklin's distrust of Brother John's regime reaches a high point when a new student informs him that he was sexually assaulted by one of the clerics. As Franklin campaigns for more humane treatment of his charges, he makes a powerful enemy in Brother John, who responds to Franklin's reform efforts with greater vehemence against the students, in particular Mercier (John Travers), an inquisitive child who has become a favorite of Franklin. But Franklin comes to believe the students are being treated with excessive force, with many of the children severely punished for trivial violations of the rules, and some treated as delinquents for the crime of not having parents. Jude's, a school for wayward boys run by Brother John Iain Glen, who is a firm believer in strong discipline. ![]() Franklin becomes the first non-cleric instructor at St. ![]() William Franklin (Aidan Quinn) is a teacher who was born in Ireland and moved to the United States only to repatriate in 1939 after his leftist political views cause him to lose his job. A teacher takes on the corrupt leadership of an Irish reform school in this drama based on a true story. ![]()
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