Thursday, October 17, 2024

The Apprentice: A Review

 

THE APPRENTICE

With the once and perhaps future President Donald Trump once again making headlines and others taking metaphorical and literal shots at him, it may not be surprising to see a biopic about Trump now in theaters. The Apprentice is a good film, until it isn't. While the film has good performances in it, The Apprentice slips into familiar territory that keeps it from achieving greater heights.

Young Donald John Trump (Sebastian Stan) is desperate to get the government off his family's back. He and his father Fred (Martin Donovan) are being sued by the federal government, which is accusing the Trump organization of racial discrimination in their Trump Village apartment complex. For help, he turns to the most ruthless lawyer in New York City: Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Using methods both legal and illegal, Cohn wins the case, though Fred is leery of this man.

Cohn takes a liking to young Donald, though exactly what kind of liking is open to interpretation. Taking the young Trump under his wing, Cohn gives him his Three Life Lessons: always attack, never admit wrongdoing and always claim victory even if you lost. Trump soon looks to Cohn as a true father figure. It might not be surprising given that Fred openly sees his namesake son Freddy (Charlie Carrick) as a failure for becoming an airline pilot and not part of Fred's real estate business. Donald has, but he is still not good enough in Fred's eyes. This comes to a head when Trump wants to go into New York and turn a dilapidated hotel in a rundown neighborhood into a luxury hotel. Cohn again fixes things for Trump, saving him from his own foolishness.

Cohn can't save him from Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova), a Czech model who is flattered by Trump's interest but is not interested herself in him. Nevertheless, he persisted, and they marry. As we enter the 1980's, Trump exhibits greater narcissism and greed. He turns his back on Freddy, now a hopeless alcoholic. He rapes Ivana after a fight. He pops pills like they were candy and seeks both liposuction and a hair transplant. He finally turns his back on his mentor Cohn, who is unwilling to admit that he is gay and that he has AIDS. Will Trump triumph over his enemies and frenemies? Will Cohn see his apprentice become the master of the art of the deal?

For the first half of The Apprentice, screenwriter Gabriel Sherman and director Ali Abbasi did something that seems impossible: they humanized The Donald. With both Stan's performance and the script, the early part of The Apprentice shows Donald Trump to be naive, almost innocent, about life. When sitting at Cohn's table, surrounded by various shady characters, Trump looks lost and insecure, hesitant even. This is not the brash, braggadocio persona we all know and (love/hate). This is almost a little boy, terrified and desperate to please and be wanted. So desperate is he for help and validation that Donald Trump, who is a teetotaler in large part because of what he has seen alcohol due to his beloved older brother, reluctantly drinks on Cohn's orders. At the end of his first alcoholic experience, he leaves Cohn's car and promptly throws up.

Trump may not have thrown up when he stumbles into a gay orgy that Cohn is participating in, but young Donald is genuinely shocked to downright terrified at what he walked into (Cohn too distracted by the sex to even notice the bedroom door opening). This Trump is so naive and unaware that when at Cohn's party, he genuinely has no idea who an artist named Andy Warhol (Bruce Beaton) is. When Warhol told him that he was an artist, Trump merely smiled and asked if he had found any success at it. His bumbling efforts to fit in at Cohn's decadent party paint Trump as the ultimate square.

The Apprentice also makes us shockingly sympathetic to Trump when he goes to Trump Village to collect the rent. Yes, we see Donald Trump be a literal rent collector. The various denizens of Trump Village range from the obnoxious to the dangerous. Trump has to endure people going from begging to more time (which Trump gives some leeway to) to having one aggressive person throw boiling water at him, causing Trump to cuss him out after the occupant slams the door on him. This is not the ruthless, arrogant figure. This is someone who is trying to please his father and father figure.

We even get genuinely human moments from Trump. His romancing of Ivana is actually sweet, his grief at Freddy's death moving. 

Had The Apprentice ended there, we would have had a film that while not celebratory of Trump, would have given him nuance and showed him as human. However, once we go into New Year's in the 1980s, complete with Blue Monday playing to signal we were in the 1980s, The Apprentice becomes what I think people would have said it would be: a hatchet job. His sudden ruthlessness, casual cruelty, obsession with his weight and potential hair loss start slipping into farce. It also seems to come out of nowhere. That The Apprentice did not show this amount of evil from Trump prior to Blue Monday makes the transition all the more jarring.

This is best or worse captured in Trump assaulting Ivana after a fight. The President will deny it, the first wife is dead and unable to say anything. It is impossible to say what happened. It is, however, hard to imagine that Ivana would have joyfully appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial with her rapist, spoofing their divorce. Introducing these elements as well as other bits like struggling to get oral sex from a random woman, take away from the good half of The Apprentice.

This is unfortunate because The Apprentice is made up of some strong performances. Sebastian Stan does a credible job as the young Trump, someone who is unsure, looking to make his mark in New York instead of his family's Queens. Stan captures Trump's voice and mannerisms. He also makes Trump into if not a pleasant person, at least a more relatable one. Once we shift post-Blue Monday, Stan becomes the parody that so many leftists and Never Trumpers take as the real Trump: buffoonish, arrogant, cruel. 

Stan, however good he was, is simply no match for Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn. Right from the get-go when Trump and Cohn look on each other, The Apprentice makes clear that Cohn is the ultimate malevolent force. With his staccato delivery and almost expressionless face, Strong forever pushes, prods and provokes all those around him. He makes Roy Cohn ruthless but direct, unable to show anything other than a drive for total domination of everything and everyone. It is a bit of a surprise to find future political fixer Roger Stone (Mark Rendall) be a pool boy at Cohn's place, but there it is. 

Unlike Stan, however, Strong never shifts from his performance. That is why his last scene is shocking, even moving. At Cohn's last birthday party where Trump presents him with an American flag cake, a visibly feeble Cohn looks at it and then breaks down in tears. It takes one aback to see this monstrous figure collapse, fully aware of his imminent death but regretful only for that and for nothing else. It does what was impossible: make Roy Cohn remotely human.

Bakolava does well as Ivana, and both Donovan and Catharine McNally as Trump's Scottish-born mother Mary Anne do well in their small roles. Donovan in particular does strong work as the disapproving and ultimately mentally incapacitated Fred Trump, Sr. I was, however, surprised that not once in The Apprentice did we ever hear Ivana call her first husband "The Donald", an accidental nickname that I believe he still uses, though to be fair it is not as prevalent as it was before. 

The Apprentice starts out well and then shifts midstream into more familiar anti-Trump territory. It does not take away from strong performances by Stan and especially Strong. I am sure that there is a better way to portray someone seen by many as a savior, others as the New or Worse Than Hitler. The ingredients are there, but The Apprentice did not mix them well enough. 

Donald Trump: born 1946
Roy Cohn: 1927-1986


DECISION: C+

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