The Apprentice (2024)
Movie of the Weak
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
Election year movies are nothing new, but I can’t think of any like The Apprentice. Political thrillers, dramas, and comedies often fictionalize the key players of whichever four-year cycle produced them (think John Travolta and Emma Thompson in Primary Colors or Will Ferrell in The Campaign). But if a filmmaker wants to score points for or against a specific party or policy, they often choose to make biopics about previous candidates: Oliver Stone waited until George W. Bush was a lame duck before making W.; Jay Roach sat out a full term before skewering the 2008 McCain/Palin ticket in 2012's Game Change.*
With The Apprentice, director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman go after former President and current candidate Donald Trump with a biopic snapshot that many anticipated would be the ultimate Hollywood hit piece. While it’s true that the film comes off as blatant, low-key election interference, it also offers a challenge to those who prefer their politics served up bite-sized and compartmentalized.
Intentionally or not, Abbasi and Sherman illustrate the bizarre duality that has dogged the real-life Trump since he announced his first run for high office in 2015: Sebastian Stan plays “The Donald” as both an overweight, emotionally stunted people-pleaser and, later, as an overweight, egomaniacal cut-throat who shrugs off sexual violence as cavalierly as a bum business deal. He’s either Chauncey Gardiner or Orange Hitler.
Hate-watchers will no doubt be disappointed by Stan’s sympathetic portrayal in the first half of the movie, which centers on a late 1970s version of Trump. By day, he’s a hangdog slumlord’s son who collects rent from hostile tenants; at evening meals with his parents and siblings, Donald listens to his wealthy father, Fred (Martin Donovan), berate his substance-abusing airline pilot older brother, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), for not making something more of himself.
One night, after failing to impress a woman at an exclusive Manhattan club, Donald catches the attention of legendarily crooked big-time lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The scene plays as a comic seduction: Cohn’s time-stopping stare across the room is accompanied by sensuous music that’s a wah wah pedal short of porn parody; soon enough, they’re sitting at the same table. The titular apprenticeship begins here, and it’s wild to see a version of Trump the famous braggart rendered as a mark who has yet to find his footing and killer instinct.
Indeed, Abbasi and Sherman lean into the differences between Trump and Cohn, to great effect. Cohn agrees to help Trump with a federal discrimination case that’s been brought against his father’s company, and teaches him three rules of success:
Attack. Attack. Attack.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything.
Claim victory. Never admit defeat.
Strong embodies these values in every facet of his magnetic performance. In early scenes, his wily, chicken-headed movements and clipped “Noo Yawk-huh” accent seem cartoonish, but the actor makes it work for the character. He’s deliberately off-putting, a sleazy, no-nonsense operator surrounded by a forcefield of invisible spinning knives. Every word is a threat veiled in condescension.
By contrast, Trump is a teetotaler with a passion for business but no access to real power. His father looms large in outer boroughs real estate, but Donald wants to devour the Big Apple. Under Cohn’s tutelage, Trump learns the art of hyperbolic self-promotion; the ins and outs of New York politics (especially when it comes to tax abatements, zoning regulations, etc.); and how to use personal information to destroy one’s enemies. Trump is a willing but hesitant student, stumbling over his words with a reporter and awkwardly navigating parties overflowing with booze, drugs, and other fluids.
Later, Trump is smitten by Czech model Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova) and goes so far as to show up at a ski resort at which she’s staying. He falls on his ass in a rom-com meet-cute moment that’s owed to a hundred Hallmark movies. As Trump begins gobbling up Manhattan real estate, Ivana becomes his creative partner, bringing her sense of fashion and design to fledgling luxury properties.
Then the 80s happen. Similar to how Boogie Nights ushered in the decade with William H. Macy’s character committing a double homicide/suicide at midnight, Abbasi and Sherman perform a record-scratching skip from the good times to the brutal times.
We pick up with a rolling-in-dough-and-deals Trump who has lost all sense of decency, humility, and mercy in the American Psycho era. He’s come to see Ivana as an overbearing control freak; he ghosts Roy Cohn who, in his later years, is barely able to explain away (much less hide) his AIDS diagnosis; and he’s devolved into a pill-popping sex freak. As much as I’m sure Star Wars fans would love to forget Attack of the Clones, the middle chapter in George Lucas’ prequel saga at least provided a bridge between wide-eyed, 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and the genocidal cyborg he was destined to become. The Apprentice’s creative team could learn a thing or three from ol’ George: if one had no idea that this film is allegedly based on a real-life person, they would rightly accuse the writing/directing duo of gross negligence in creating a believable character named Donald Trump.**
Here’s where anti-Trump readers will likely take frothing exception to my critique. “Of course he’s an idiotic cartoon monster! I mean, it’s Donald Trump!” The problem with The Apprentice’s second half is that it feels as though, in creating the first half, they forgot that the assignment was a hatchet job. Thus, without the luxury of additional time or money to fix their “mistake”, they were forced to plow ahead with an incongruously harsh portrait of a skinsuit-wearing id.
The result, as I’ve suggested, is a disjointed movie whose protagonist doesn’t feel remotely real. I was so jarred by The Apprentice that I decided to pick up a copy of Trump’s 1987 business autobiography, The Art of the Deal (co-written by Tony Schwartz, who appears as a character toward the end of the film). While I didn’t expect Trump to confess to corrupt business dealings, horrific behavior, or outright crimes, I thought at least he’d have more to say about the man who’d supposedly ushered him to the top of the game. Alas, Roy Cohn is mentioned on 5 pages out of 367–and in terms that are complimentary but hardly idolatrous.
Unlike the movie, the book treats other key players in Trump’s life with sufficient reverence, such as his father (far from the cold, overbearing tyrant seen in the film) and his ex-wife, Ivana (“a great manager who treats her employees very well”). In fact, there are a surprising number of anecdotes involving Trump going out of his way to hire women into high-powered executive roles throughout his growing organization in the 1980s–a detail that is completely skipped in The Apprentice’s numerous “backroom boys’ club” scenes, and which doesn’t align with the out-of-absolutely-nowehere sexual assault moment involving movie-Ivana and an argument over “The G Spot”.
The Apprentice would have you believe that Trump’s war with New York City over multi-million-dollar tax abatements came down to strong-arming and/or blackmailing politicians and bureaucrats. Trump and Schwartz’s written account of these complex negotiations goes on for dozens of pages at a stretch, detailing the ins and outs of contracts, zoning law minutiae, and the role the media played in making or breaking historically precarious deals. One could argue that none of that would make for a compelling movie (I disagree, especially as written), but it’s inarguably disingenuous to brush aside history (or at least not lend it some dimensionality based on alternative accounts) in the name of forwarding a narrative that may be complete bullshit to begin with.
I’m reminded of another recent film, Saturday Night, which purports to tell the story of the hectic 90 minutes leading up to the 1975 debut of what would become Saturday Night Live. I didn’t like the movie, partly because it felt as though the filmmakers tried too hard to project 2024 politics into a dramedy set four decades in the past. I know for a fact that some of what was being presented as “true events” had been copy/pasted from later years, or had been exaggerated to the point of parody. When discussing the film the following week on a KtS livestream with old-school SNL fan Jeff York, I realized that the entire movie was a hoax (sorry, “a sterling example of creative license taken to the extreme”).
I think of The Apprentice in the same way. It’s a meta-polemic disguised as a historical drama, created with the intent of painting POTUS 45 as a dimwitted, lascivious puppet, twisting on the strings of Joe McCarthy’s attorney. In later scenes depicting Roy Cohn’s struggle to cover up his pallid cheeks and pockmarks, he begins over-doing the bronzer–giving him…wait for it…the appearance of bright orange skin (“Just like Trump has today!”).
Despite this, it’s inaccurate to call The Apprentice propaganda. One of the tenets of propaganda is that it doesn’t appear to be propaganda. Abbasi and Sherman wear their dislike of Trump on their sleeves, despite meager efforts to draw out his humanity before going full “Orange Man Bad” mode. Left-leaning viewers will no doubt walk away sufficiently horrified by all the “facts” they see dramatized on-screen (including a truly tasteless “Frankenstein” sequence involving liposuction and hair plug surgery), much in the same way, I imagine, they take comfort in believing the “fine people” and “drinking bleach” hoaxes. Those on the Right who refuse to watch The Apprentice, for obvious reasons, can rest assured that their skepticism is warranted—though, as I’ve said, there’s far more sympathy in this story than anyone could have expected.
I highly recommend The Apprentice. Partly because its weird politics deserve to be scrutinized. Partly because of the robust performances across the board, especially those of Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong.*** I may not agree with the way their characters are drawn, but there’s no denying the actors’ commitment to sidestepping caricature. The hustlin’, bustlin’ 70’s and 80’s New York energy is also on point. Few films this year have felt so daring and alive. I just wish someone had thought to adapt The Art of the Deal instead of hastily churning out the celluloid version of blind item partisan gossip.
That movie would’ve been huge. Tremendous. Fantastic, even.
*Some of these movies are actually favorable toward politicians, such as Richard Tanne's sanitized, saccharine Obama meet-cute, Southside with You.
**I had a similar problem with Oliver Stone’s W.
*** The exception is Mark Rendall’s brief appearance as Roger Stone, in a turn so cartoonishly flamboyant and disconnected from his real-life counterpart that I can only imagine it was meant to imply that everyone in Trump’s orbit is a barely closeted gay hypocrite.
