Whether or not you are capable of finding any sympathy for Donald Trump is between you and Ali Abbasi’s new film, The Apprentice. Starring Sebastian Stan as a young Donald just making a name for himself in the world of 1970s New York real estate,
The Apprentice is a film that takes a surprisingly even-handed look at the forces that shaped Trump. The film begins in the late Seventies, with Donald collecting rents in his father’s run-down apartment complex in Coney Island, where tenants throw boiling water at him and can barely muster up rents. Donald’s dad, Fred (Martin Donovan), is being sued for racial discrimination by the federal government, which opens the door for attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) to make his mark on status-obsessed Donald.
Under Roy’s venal influence, Donald rises up the New York business and society ladders, until he becomes the emblem of Eighties excess and success, with his tacky luxury buildings and wildly corrupt business dealings. When they first meet, Roy is at the pinnacle of his own success, claiming he’s the one who got the judge to order executions for both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and boasting about his connections all over the government, from the local to the federal level. Roy is a closeted gay man blackmailing other closeted men to ensure his legal victories and throwing wild sex-and-drug fueled parties while claiming America is in the toilet and only him and his twisted brand of patriotism, which is best defined as “anything I like is good for America and everything I hate is bad for it”, can save it.
Stan and Strong give a pair of perfectly dovetailed performances. Under Roy’s tutelage, Donald grows from a somewhat indecisive shadow of his father to his own, terribly corrupt but successful man. Roy, though, fades in Donald’s shadow, repeated indictments and, eventually, AIDS taking its toll on his health—though Roy is quick to claim he has liver cancer, not HIV/AIDS. Stan and Strong perform their character arcs like Donald and Roy are in a parasitical relationship, the stronger Donald grows, the weaker Roy becomes, until he is a shell of himself, while Donald has become “monstrous” (he’s obsessed with his weight gain and expanding girth).
Abbasi, meanwhile, dresses his film in celluloid grit. Shot in a 4x3 aspect ratio and with visible grain, the film looks like an episode of The Lifestyles of the Rich Famous. But rather than highlight glamour, as that show intended, The Apprentice is wholly ugly. Everyone’s skin looks terrible—except Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova), she’s lit like an angel descending from heaven—and tacky interiors are made worse by the degraded look of the film (lensed by cinematographer Kasper Tuxen). It’s obviously deliberate, a comment in itself on the film’s subjects and their actions. It also serves to highlight how awful Donald and Roy look. Roy starts out as a fake tanned goblin, Donald ends up there.
But how effective this is, is strictly in the eye of the beholder. Early on, it’s possible to feel some sympathy for a striver working under a disapproving father and trying to make up for a disappointing older brother, Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick), who is “merely” an airline pilot. When Roy gets his hooks into the class-conscious and ambitious young Donald, you can see the writing on the wall, and you may or may not experience a pang of sympathy for what might have been if a turd-eating toad like Roy Cohn hadn’t gotten into Donald’s head at that point. But Roy DID get his hooks in, and we DO know where it ends up, which is where I, personally, lost interest in Donald as a protagonist. All the nudges about his political future fall flat, though Donald declaring he wouldn’t run for office unless he failed at business first did get a half-laugh. It’s the best joke in the film.
What works much better is seeing the light die in everyone’s eyes around Donald. Ivana sweeps in, beautiful and tacky and determined, just like Donald. She resists his straight-up stalking, but eventually he wins her over, though Roy’s pre-nup is almost another breaking point—watching Ivana ignore every red flag is deeply frustrating. Still, they marry, and Ivana tries to make it work. The more successful he is, though, and perhaps the more children Ivana has, the less Donald desires her. There is, however, a difficult and graphic scene in which he assaults Ivana after she makes fun of his thinning hair. From that point, the light is gone from Ivana’s eyes, and the most heartbreaking moment in the film is Ivana mustering a smile for cameras as she continues to appear on Donald’s arm.
Similarly, Jeremy Strong comes through with a devastating third act turn. As Roy’s health fades and his financial woes mount, he reaches out to Donald for help. Donald is condescending, rude, and dismissive, but some shred of remembered camaraderie prompts him to bring Roy to Florida for his birthday, and Roy seems genuinely touched. But there he sees the extent of Donald’s moral decay, and while it’s a bit f-cking rich coming from ROY COHN, the light dies in his eyes, too, as he realizes Donald was never really like him. As loathsome as Roy is, as corrupt and twisted his beliefs, at least he truly believes in the things he says. Donald, in contrast, believes in nothing except being perceived as a “killer”, which is his word for “winner”. Anything that smacks of loss must be repudiated, up to and including Roy, whose illness and legal woes make him untenable in Donald’s world.
There is no denying that Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and Maria Bakalova all do tremendous work. Stan is especially good once the switch flips in Donald and his humanity vacates his soul. Stan’s penchant for playing rich assholes has never been so finely attuned, and his expressions and physicality take on the proportions of physical comedy late in the film. Strong is the stand-out, though. As unremittingly awful as Roy is for most of the film, his final scenes are genuinely wrenching. It’s like you can see Roy’s soul being pulled into hell in Strong’s face. But while I enjoy these performances, sitting through an allegorical speed-run of Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence is less endearing. It's to their credit that Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman didn’t make a straight-up hit piece, but whether or not their take on the rise (and rise) of Donald Trump works is up to you.
The Apprentice is now playing exclusively in theaters.
