Given the subject matter, The Apprentice has been a lightning rod for controversy. But how is it as a movie?
PLOT: A depiction of the early days of Donald Trump’s (Sebastian Stan) business empire and how his friendship with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) paved the way for his rise to power.
REVIEW: The Apprentice is one of those movies everyone seems to have an opinion about, regardless of whether they’ve seen it or not. Indeed, only a privileged group who saw it at Cannes and Telluride can really say what it is or isn’t, and now, thanks to a special, invite-only surprise screening at TIFF (where it’s not playing as part of the official selection), you can add JoBlo to that list.
So, I walked into The Apprentice expecting a dark, political drama akin to the work of Oliver Stone. This isn’t that movie, with director Ali Abbasi making this a somewhat apolitical work. Trump’s foray into politics isn’t mentioned beyond one or two moments of foreshadowing or a bit where a young Roger Stone tries to convince Trump to consider running for office. Instead, this is all about how Trump became one of the world’s most controversial, aggressive businessmen – long before he ever thought about becoming president.
In it, we see how the ambitious Trump initially seeks to come out from the shadow of his father, Fred (an unrecognizable Martin Donovan), and how he finds a patron who, in many ways, molded him into the man he is today. Abassi has said that he thinks Trump would like his film, and for most of the movie, I agreed with him, as it presents him as utterly ruthless, which is a trait about himself I don’t think Trump would disagree with. But, the movie also depicts Trump as raping Ivana (played by Maria Bakalova), and if the film gets slammed by him, it will be because of that.
Otherwise, this isn’t all that different from a movie like The Wolf of Wall Street, with Sebastian Stan not overplaying Trump in a caricature-ish way. As the film progresses and he becomes more of the guy we know now, he adopts more of the mannerisms, but for much of the running time, he’s still a young man. In many ways, the movie’s true star is Succession’s Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn.
For those who don’t know, Cohn was a notorious figure in New York high society, with him a pit bull of a lawyer famous for defending mobsters and being utterly without mercy or scruples. He was also Joseph McCarthy’s lap dog during the Red Scare and played a direct role in sending The Rosenbergs to the electric chair. He was also a homosexual who, nevertheless, was publicly homophobic and suffered from AIDS for years, which he denied until his dying day.
Strong initially plays Cohn as a diabolical figure who uses Trump as a pawn in his own desire for power. But as the film goes on, we see that Cohn, in his own way, grew to love Trump as a surrogate son, only to be discarded as his profile became toxic and he lost what made him so fearful of an opponent. His tragedy is nearly Shakespearean, and he makes you see that the human (and soul) is a man many consider utterly repugnant.
Abbasi gives The Apprentice a tremendous sense of pace, with it a lean and mean two hours, and entertaining from start to finish, regardless of where on the political spectrum you may be. The look of the film is intriguing, with it shot in a 1:33:1 aspect ratio. The film’s early parts look like grimy seventies 16mm, while it segues to a stylized, analog video look as we enter the eighties. The song choices are excellent, running the gamut from New Order to Pet Shop Boys to punk rock. Despite a limited budget, it’s also highly evocative of a time when New York was still a place to be feared by many people, way before it became gentrified by people like Trump.
More than anything, this movie is about how men like Trump are formed and somewhat cautionary about how the desire for power breeds ruthlessness. Again, I don’t think Trump himself would dislike much about this—save for the way it depicts the unravelling of his relationship with Ivana. It is a thoroughly entertaining film with a broader appeal than you might think, even if some are positioning it with their own agendas as something it is not.
