It’s wild to see, late in a U.S. Presidential election cycle, a biopic on one of the candidates that plays like a Scorsese crime drama, featuring scenes of blackmail, spousal abuse, gay orgies, and family backstabbing. It’s even wilder to know how little hyperbole is in such scenes; but then such is the character of Donald Trump -or at least the character, as this movie argues, that was moulded by his mentor Roy Cohn.
Trump and his allies have unsurprisingly endeavoured to suppress The Apprentice since its Cannes debut -especially given the timing of its release and particularly damning portrait of the former and potentially future President, as it chronicles the formation of the ruthless tactics and zero-sum-game philosophy that have informed so much of his business and political careers. The fact of the movie’s distribution should not be taken for granted in light of this -because it doesn’t just aspire to tell the story of Trump but of the America that he has created.
So much of it, this film makes the case, comes back to vicious prosecutorial titan Roy Cohn, here played by Jeremy Strong. Rather bluntly the movie opens on Richard Nixon’s famous “I’m not a crook” speech -which neatly ties one criminal president to another. Nixon was a personal friend of Cohn, as Cohn brags in the movie, who operated under some of the same fundamental rules that Cohn would pass down to his apprentice, a young real estate developer from a wealthy family with prideful ambitions, Donald Trump (a baffling though eventually convincing Sebastian Stan).
He doesn’t enter the film fully formed but Cohn does, spying him from across the room at a luxurious restaurant, and in their early encounters applying the same seductive patterns he’s implied to have used on other young men. Strong is very intense in the role, projecting total unscrupulous confidence and a devious cunning as he draws Trump into his orbit and sets an example. Stan meanwhile plays Trump as someone with ambition, but no structure or knowledge or underhanded machination with which to achieve it. Cohn is not only the necessary force in shaping his personality, but instrumental in achieving his goals, creating the image of Trump as a hyper-successful deal-maker and businessman. But Trump is all ego, the movie suggests; Trump Tower, his passion project characterized as merely the symbol of his desire to surpass the success and influence of his father Fred Trump (Martin Donovan).
And Trump is quick to apply Cohn’s philosophy -summed up in three general rules, which he ends the film repeating as his own: attack relentlessly, deny everything, and never admit defeat. He gets in trouble the first time he tries it, Cohn essentially having to come to his rescue -but eventually of course he masters it as it comes to govern every aspect of his life both within and outside the contours of the film. Director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman keenly draft this thesis for Trump’s general life and career strategy and how it has worked for forty years -inviting the audience to make connections between his actions as a mogul and as a President/presidential candidate, all the while showcasing his corrupt character.
Trump and his supporters are right in that this movie is nakedly partisan; very shortly after a scene of Trump showing off the New York skyline to a toddler Don Jr., he is seen receiving oral sex from a prostitute in his own hotel. But it is a partisan movie in presentation not in facts (something which can’t be said for the other side’s recent propaganda film about Reagan), as it draws on many open secrets and various accounts of Trump’s behaviour during this time. It does present as authentic certain rumours, like his liposuction and hair transplant surgery, and his pressuring Ivana to get breast implants -though none of these seem out of character. For her part, playing Ivana, Maria Bakalova has perhaps the most difficult job in the movie, having to play someone falling for Donald Trump. She’s at the centre of a controversial scene based on her own account that she did, to be fair, walk back in the years since, where she is sexually assaulted by Donald after mocking his bald spot.
It’s a scene that does cross the line into tastelessness even as non-explicit as it is, and is indicative of a strain to the movie that feels very vindictive for its own sake. It can be seen in a few of Stan’s choices when dealing with Trump’s intelligence or ego or certain moments like his turning out of doors his alcoholic brother Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick) mere days before his death. The character is loathsome enough without veering into territory disconnected from the central theme and that feels rooted in anger or designed to intentionally provoke either Trump himself or his political opponents.
There can be a cheapness of intent in place, not unlike the monogrammed cuff links Trump gives to Cohn at a party towards the end of the film in the late-80s, which are revealed to be a knock-off. This is the final point of the apprentice outpacing the master. That Frankensteinian dichotomy is the film's most compelling theme, especially as Trump eclipses Cohn's capacity to control him once he begins dying of AIDS. Naturally, Cohn took to his own principles right up until death, denying the truth of his condition (and his sexuality) while attacking the gay community to maintain his status, and never admitting defeat as he weakly watches his pupil build an empire. No doubt Trump will go out the same way, incapable of change or acknowledging wrong.
This film cannot be taken in a vacuum, and both Abbasi and Strong have emphasised this. It cannot be pretended that the story they are telling is not deeply consequential for the immediate present. Trump is arguably the most talked about man in the world, and in taking on the roots of how he got to that point as a means of commenting on and exposing America for the particular evil it fosters, it means reckoning with a present situation where Trump's grip on the country remains steadfast. Cohn's legacy lives on, and in a terrifying way has been disseminated by Trump to masses of the American public. The Apprentice provides the blueprint of Trump's strategy and calls it out for its fraud; but also shows its effectiveness as we well know.
Still, it is not so sobering as it aims to be; an understanding of how Trump was made and who made him is not an understanding of Trump himself. But then, who can or wants to understand Trump? Abbasi had a difficult task in making this biopic, especially given both the broadness in its subject matter that can't be avoided and the extremely polarized circus it is being thrown into. And he works with it about as well as is possible. It is an interesting movie, and to some extent a useful one. But any greater power of it remains to be seen.
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