The Apprentice (2024)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Orange Deals

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice is cheekily named after Donald Trump's infamous reality show, which began in 2004 and ran for fourteen seasons, but in it, Trump is actually the apprentice. Played to perfection by Sebastian Stan, he makes a Faustian deal with the devil, or rather, notorious lawyer Roy Cohn (similarly played to perfection by Jeremy Strong). It's the 1970s, and we see Cohn take young Trump under his wing, and teach him three rules — 1) Attack, Attack, Attack, 2) Always Deny, Never Admit, and 3) Never Admit Defeat; Always Claim Victory — which Trump clearly took to heart. More importantly, we see the student eventually surpass the teacher, and subsequently throw the teacher to the curb. Which leads, I think, to what is perhaps the film's key sequence.

In this sequence, after ignoring Cohn's calls, Trump, out of the blue, phones him. We can't tell if the call is genuine or not. Trump says something about wanting some free legal advice, but also says that Cohn was the only person who cared about him. He invites Cohn for a birthday party at Mar-A-Lago. He gives Cohn a gift, and makes a speech. The gift is a pair of expensive-looking cufflinks, emblazoned with a name: Trump's. Then, at dinner, Ivana (an excellent Maria Bakalova), quietly informs Cohn that the cufflinks are cheap fakes. And we realize that the birthday speech is really all about Trump. Cohn dies the next day, and, rather than mourn, Trump undergoes a liposuction surgery, as well as a truly disgusting procedure to reduce his receding hairline.

This series of events is a back-and-forth expression of gratitude, juxtaposed with disdain, that gets jumbled up and turns into a repellent mush. Whether or not Trump was actually trying to be genuine, he simply couldn't, was incapable. According to the movie, Cohn taught Trump everything, except for humanity. At the end, Cohn is shown to have feelings for his "friend" Russell (Ben Sullivan), who has AIDS, and is seen weeping at Trump's party. Conversely, Trump weeps one time during the movie, presumably mourning the death of his older brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick), but his response is to stifle back the tears and shout at Ivana, "don't look at me and don't touch me." Feelings are for chumps and losers.

Mostly, we see the Trump that we're all familiar with, the Trump that — prior to 2015 — was a somewhat amusing character. We see him as braggart, huckster, con artist, cheater, and exaggerator, as well as a betrayer, bad parent, rapist, racist, bigot, narcissist, philanderer, etc. The film's smart, final scene shows the monster fully-formed, preparing to have his 1987 best-seller The Art of the Deal ghost-written for him. (The film only drops small, sinister hints about the man who would became the most dangerous person to ever seek the office of president, and its biggest threat to Democracy, a man whose lack of moral code and an inability to care about anything other than himself led to authoritarian tendencies, which, ironically, Cohn says he abhors.)

So the job of Iranian-born director Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) and American screenwriter Gabriel Sherman is to find that shred of something in Trump that we can identify as human. It's not an easy one, but they pull it off. Most of it comes across in the early scenes, when Trump is younger, wearing ill-fitting suits and with a mop of hair that earns him comparisons to Robert Redford. He's earned a membership in an elite nightclub, and he tries vainly to impress his date with this information; she excuses herself to "powder her nose" and never returns. He's a little awkward, and is certainly under his father's thumb, with no idea how to get out. He struggles with his weight and his vanity, and he certainly struggles with his changing relationship with Cohn.

It's in these scenes that the filmmakers succeed. Otherwise, The Apprentice would have been a hatchet-job, an easy lashing-out at low-hanging-fruit, something that many comedians have done with searing accuracy over the past eight-plus years. And using the Faustian relationship between Trump and Cohn, rather than focusing solely on Trump himself, makes for a great, American story with a solid beginning and ending; it could have been an opera. And, whereas most biopics center around only one great performance with little else going on, this one manages three great performances (by Stan, Strong, and Bakalova). It sometimes falls back on some lazy biopic elements, such as the character's "moment of discovery" of some monumental thing, or the squishing together of two important events into one scene. But it's overall an above-average example of the genre.

What was the goal of this movie, then, especially rushing to get it into theaters prior to the 2024 election, over the real-life Trump's objections? I think it does one important task. It provides a decently "fair and balanced" look at this complex man. In the most polarized U.S. in history, he is either seen as a godlike saint or an evil boogeyman. Hammering at those polar opposites isn't going to get anywhere. Neither of them are true, and the movie does a good job of pushing/pulling things back to reality. And that reality is that Trump is a deeply flawed man, with personal issues that, due to his power and wealth, have never been addressed. Whatever he may have been or still could be, we can see that he is not, never was, and never will be, fit to be the President of the United States.