The Apprentice is a dramatised biopic of Donald Trump, covering his early business years. He has called the film ‘FAKE and CLASSLESS’ and ‘garbage’ – but he wishes it well. I’m pulling your leg. ‘It will hopefully “bomb”,’ he has said. He hasn’t seen it, as far as anyone knows – I wish I could review films without seeing them; so time-saving – but even so, the writer, Gabriel Sherman, is ‘a lowlife and talentless hack’.
If Trump had not trashed the film, you could say it had failed in what it was trying to reveal, which is: why does he behave this way? Where does his attacking mindset come from? It’s an origin story, if you like, and I was gripped throughout. It’s brilliantly acted and conceived, and it takes its subject seriously. It’s not like an extended Saturday Night Live routine.
The film is set in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s and begins with Donald (Sebastian Stan) working for his father’s real estate company as a rent collector. His father has never made him feel worthy, is disdainful of him in fact, which makes him desperate to impress – desperate for success. (This is not laid on thick. This is what you infer from the scenes round the family dining table.)
Donald is ambitious. He’s already dreaming of Trump Tower. But he’s a no-mark who no one entertains seriously until he enlists the help of lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who had previously been Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and is now working for the Mob. I could write reams about Cohn (look up the nose job he was forced to have as a teenager), but for our purposes he’s a power-crazed, ruthless, amoral force who will stop at nothing to win.
At the time, Donald and his father were facing a federal suit for alleged discrimination – and the evidence that they would not rent to black people was overwhelming. But Cohn gets them off the hook by blackmailing a government figure with compromising material. ‘Play the man, not the ball,’ he tells Donald, whose eyes are opened. He becomes Cohn’s apprentice. When Cohn imparts his strategy for always coming out on top – attack, attack, attack; deny everything; claim victory and never admit defeat – he takes these principles so to heart it’s still his playbook today. If Trump’s first response had not been to attack this film, I’d have wanted my money back.
The movie is sometimes compassionate, sometimes ruthless and often tragic, particularly when it comes to Donald turning his back on Cohn, having outgrown him (here I felt some All About Eve vibes). It’s directed briskly by Ali Abbasi and is episodic as we catch up with Trump down the years. We see him court Ivana (Maria Bakalova), make deals, obfuscate his debts, build Trump Tower and basically seek to fill his emotional void with wealth and status. His vanity becomes monstrous. When Ivana taunts him about his weight gain and thinning hair, he rapes her. He has liposuction, a hair transplant, and there’s a wonderfully comedic scene with a diet-pill doctor.
The performances are insanely good. Stan, after years of putting the hours in to the Marvel franchise, has suddenly emerged as one of the most transformative actors working today (See also: A Different Man). He embodies the essence of Trump without slipping into caricature. You get the occasional mannerism, or those lips that purse like the tied-up end of a balloon, but nothing that ever seems like a crass imitation. And Strong’s performance convincingly takes Cohn from a place of strength to one of devastating heartbreak.
It’s pure class. But, just to be clear, reviews from those who have yet to see the film are also available. In this instance, you may find that it is ‘disgusting’ and has been made by ‘HUMAN SCUM’.
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