The Apprentice
There’s a part of me that wonders whether Donald Trump would actually appreciate Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice.” I mean, we see him rise in the ’70s and ’80s from someone helping his father Fred in the real estate business to become an entity on his own. There is no fall, however; yes, we see unflattering parts of him like his rape of first wife Ivana and his disrespect to mentor Roy Cohn at the end of his life, but ultimately, what we know about the 45th President of the United States seems to jive with how he portrays himself, and let’s face it, there’s no moral degradation because he doesn’t change from the first minute to the last. He just gets more ruthless.
What makes Abbasi’s film a frustrating experience is that the screenplay by Gabriel Sherman doesn’t seem to have an aim to it. Yes, I suppose there is value in seeing how Trump’s relationship with Cohn shaped him into the man we’ve seen in the spotlight for four decades now, but if you’re looking for new insights into Trump, “The Apprentice” isn’t really going to offer any. I don’t know that you can consider it a hit piece on Trump, either, simply because it’s not a film that goes for easy jokes and portrays Trump as a buffoon intentionally; one of the things I admire about Abbasi’s film- and Sebastian Stan’s performance as Trump- is how he simply presents him as we’ve seen him. His arc is how he went from a helper to his father to a cutthroat businessman. His buffoonery is how we respond to his garish look and ego that he presents for the world to see; Abbasi, Sherman and Stan avoided an easy trap by just letting him be who we see him to be. Part of the problem with that, however, is that it doesn’t give the film anywhere to go thematically; it just gives us a log of events in his life, without insight into what they say about him, and those who admire him.
The other central character in this film is Roy Cohn, the notorious political fixer whose legacy goes back to the McCarthy era (he helped convict the Rosenbergs), and who helped Trump get his father’s business out of the trouble it had with DOJ and its charges of racial discrimination in housing. Cohn is played by Jeremy Strong, and it is a great fit for how Strong excels on screen, as a smart, ruthless personality who can be very funny but also project a sense of danger. What surprises me so much about his work is how, the sicker Cohn gets (he died of AIDS in 1986), the more empathetic we feel for him. Yes, he was a “win at all costs” asshole not above blackmailing politicians to get his way, but seeing him become a husk of the person he once was, and become just another person Trump throws away when he’s not needed anymore, is sad, in spite of how awful he was. If anything, that is the fundamental idea behind “The Apprentice” (and it might be better to view the film as being about Roy Cohn than it is about Trump)- be careful how much trust you put in a person like Trump; when he feels like you’re no use to him anymore, he’ll turn on you. And even though I didn’t need a two-hour movie to remind me of that, it’s something that is always worth remembering.
