THE APPRENTICE reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Ali Abbasi
Stars: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Martin Donovan, Maria Bakalova, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Merk Rendall, Ben Sullivan, Joe Pingue, Bruce Beaton, Ian D Clark.
Donald Trump is one of the most controversial and divisive figures in contemporary American politics at the moment and he has dominated the political landscape for the better part of a decade. And in the lead up to the 2024 election it is easy to see why he and his campaign have tried to ban this drama from Iranian born Danish director Ali Abbasi (the 2022 Persian crime drama Holy Spider, etc), making his English language debut here.
The Apprentice has been written by tv journalist and writer Gabriel Sherman (Alaska Daily, etc) and this well researched biopic charts Trump’s formative years and his pre-White House rise to power via his aggressive development of the New York real estate market. Sherman had interviewed Trump a number of times during his career and draws upon his insights to shape this fictionalised treatment of his early rise to a position of prominence in New York.
The film takes its title from Trump’s own successful reality tv show, which ran for 15 seasons from 2004-2017. But here ironically Trump himself is the apprentice, being tutored by pugnacious and unscrupulous lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn himself was a controversial figure – in the 50s he prosecuted the Rosenbergs for spying and passing on nuclear secrets to the Russians, and he was also a key figure in the 1950’s Mccarthy era trials that prosecuted communists, communist sympathisers and homosexuals and which destroyed reputations and livelihoods. Cohn was also the lawyer who represented powerful mob figures. In the 80s he was disbarred for his corrupt practices.
This film is largely set in New York in the 70s and early 80s. Donald Trump (played here by Sebastian Stan, from the MCU/Captain America films) is a young real estate agent who is trying to break away from the shadow of his powerful father Fred and establish himself as a developer hoping to leave his mark on the city of New York. Trump and Cohn met by chance in a swanky New York club and the slick powerful lawyer took the naive but ambitious realtor under his wing. In 1973 Cohn (played here by Jeremy Strong, from the tv series Succession, etc) took the young Trump under his wing. He helped Trump take on the US government over allegations that his company refused to rent some of their properties to people of colour. Cohn instilled in the young Trump his aggressive style that has come to dominate American politics. According to Cohn the way to become successful was to always attack, deny everything and never admit defeat, and this mantra became Trump’s key playbook.
Abbasi depicts the New York of the time as a decaying, sleazy and corrupt cesspool through some superb production design and the integration of archival footage. Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen (The Professor And The Madman, etc) does a great job of giving the material a nostalgic 80s look and feel with the grainy brownish colour palette, and the setting comes alive.
There is a rather gratuitously gruesome scene depicting Trump undergoing liposuction and surgery which will have some in the audience looking away.
Stan depicts Trump as an amoral businessman and captures his narcissistic personality, but he also captures his insecurities and vanity. Strong delivers a charismatic but chillingly precise and exacting performance as the predatory, slick and sharp Cohn, who exerted a Svengali-like influence over Trump, capturing his bullying style, his cold persona, his quietly menacing nature. The chemistry between the two is palpable and brings the material alive. Martin Donovan also makes the most of his unsympathetic role as Donald’s father, the condescending and aloof Fred Trump, who grows envious of the younger Donald’s success and wealth. Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, etc) does what she can with a largely thankless role as Trump’s glamorous but increasingly bored first wife Ivana, a former model turned interior decorator and designer.
Abbasi himself has stated that he didn’t intend the film to be a “hit piece” on Trump himself, but rather an exploration of the influences that helped to shape him into the man we see today. The film concludes with Trump working on his book The Art Of The Deal with a ghostwriter and staking claim to coining Cohn’s mantra on his own. The Apprentice is an unflattering portrait of Trump, but it is ultimately a little bland however. One is left to wonder what a filmmaker of Oliver Stone’s incendiary calibre would have done with this material.
★★★
