ExNotes Movie Reviews: Zone of Interest and The Assistant

By Joe Berk

From time to time, Gresh and I have posted movie reviews here on ExNotes.  Working from an admittedly flaky memory, I think all our reviews have generally been positive. I remember the review on Operation Mincemeat, for example. That movie was one of the best I’ve ever seen (I liked it so much I watched it a third time this weekend). But not everything is golden. Susie and I watched two movies on MAX (one of our subscription services) this weekend and they were two of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.  I thought maybe it was a guy thing, but Sue had the same opinion.  The miscreant motion pictures are The Zone of Interest and The Assistant.

Both The Assistant and The Zone of Interest were terrible for the same reasons:  They had no plot, no beginning, and no ending.  Did you ever start to watch a movie and switch it off because nothing was happening in the first 15 minutes or so?  In these movies, that continued for the duration of the entire show.  Both were train wrecks, not in the sense that they had lots of action, but because we didn’t stop looking at them.  We could have, but we hung in there waiting to see if anything would happen. There was this feeling that something has to happen soon, but it never did in either movie.

The Zone of Interest is a story about a Nazi concentration camp commandant and his family living the good life in a nice home just outside the camp walls.  I suppose the contrast between how well they lived and what was going on inside the camp was supposed to heighten the dramatic effect, but you never saw what was happening on the other side.  The cinematography (if that’s the right word) was off, too.  The imagery mostly looked overexposed, and in a few instances, the film makers switch to images of people being portrayed as white empty spaces, almost as if they had just discovered the select-and-delete feature in their video editing software.  It didn’t work for either Sue or me.  The critics loved this movie (if you believe the advertisements), but take it from me, they’re lying.   When the credits flashed on the screen at the end, we were both surprised.  “That’s it?” Sue asked.  Yep.  There was no ending.  It just stopped and the credits popped up. This porker of a motion picture would put the Hoover vacuum cleaner company to shame: It sucked big time.

The Assistant suffered from the same ills:  No plot, no action, no ending, and bad exposure control.  I think it was a cheap and hurried effort to cash in on the #Me, too movement, sort of depicting a young female assistant (played by Julia Garner) being humiliatingly treated by a Harvey Weinstein-like boss (who you never saw in the movie).  It’s a pity, really.  I wanted to like this movie when I saw that Julia Garner was in it.  She was brilliant in Ozark and the Inventing Anna series.  Garner’s acting was good in this one, too, but the lack of a beginning, an end, and any semblance of a plot were deficiencies even her considerable acting  skills couldn’t overcome.

Unlike the exposure control failures in Zone of Interest, The Assistant erred in the other direction:  Everything was underexposed.  I’m guessing that was to emphasize the dark nature of the movie, but it didn’t work for me.  Give us a good story line, a plot, and proper exposure. We’ll figure it out. I knew you people in movieland can afford a lightmeter or two.

There was one good scene in The Assistant.  Matthew Macfadyen, who also starred in Operation Mincemeat and the Succession series, played a human resources executive.  In this scene, Julia Garner attempted to complain about her invisible man boss (invisible at least to us viewers) and Macfadyen played a two-faced, deceptive HR executive perfectly.  I thought his portrayal was brilliant.  In more than 40 years of working in industry, I found all human resources executives to be two faced and deceptive (with one notable exception at Sargent-Fletcher Company).  Macfadyen nailed it, but that one scene does not justify the time I wasted watching this dog of a movie.

We realized The Assistant had ended when the credits popped up.  There was no other indication in the way the plot had been progressing, and that’s because there was no plot (as had been the case with The Zone of Interest).  I give both movies two thumbs down, and that’s only because I only have two thumbs.

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