The Apprentice: Killer means winner
the true crime that's worth your time
Take your pick: fraud; extortion; attorney misconduct; sexual assault; '80s hair…
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The story
The Apprentice, a story in two acts about Donald J. Trump's rise to national prominence, and Roy Cohn's role in same, doesn't entirely succeed in what it's trying to do. But what it's trying to do has a fairly high degree of difficulty, and I want to give the film credit for that, although its true crime isn't quite worth your time.
Directed by Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider), The Apprentice begins with Trump's flails in the direction of deal-making and influence in 1970s New York City, then jumps forward to his expansionist '80s. This is an interesting choice, probably designed to highlight the idea that Cohn created an ungrateful monster, but it doesn't really work: if there's anything here that we don't already know, it's in the very early Reagan years we don't see.
The casting and acting work – Sebastian Stan as Trump nails the way the real guy occupies space, his tic-y hand gestures and weird Claymation lip-pursing; Jeremy Strong's process sounds utterly insufferable, but he does find a way to suggest an interior emotional life for Cohn that isn't 100 percent repellent – and this is where the difficulty comes in. Our singularly deranged times are, on paper, simply not believable; the figures who dominate the headlines of these times are caricatures, parodies of themselves.
In accounts of the Trump era and the people who feature in it, it's a real challenge to present any of it straightforwardly, versus just slopping the canvas with orange paint, shrieking "NO: SERIOUSLY," and calling it a day, when everything plays like a fever dream and at top volume. Anyone creating a narrative pertaining to the era is going to face that challenge going forward, too, to somehow depict a scabrously cartoonish reality in a credible way. I don't think Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman (The Loudest Voice) got their arms all the way around the story, in the end, but they maintain an even tone and temperature in The Apprentice, a steady focus on just relating what happened – no small thing when "what happened" is not unlike a boorish car crash experienced from the trunk, and it's important practice.
Still, Trump and Cohn are both monsters, period, and the actors do create moments of sympathy for each of them – and that's what actors do, find the movement or growth and play it, but IRL, there is nothing redeemable to play. There's a moment near the end of the film when Cohn is dying, and a huge birthday cake in the shape of an American flag is rolled out to the Mar-A-Lago dining room, festooned by sparklers that throw hellfire light and shadow onto Cohn's face. Cohn has just been told, not terribly gently, by Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova) that the gaudy Trump-branded cufflinks Trump has just self-congratulatorily gifted to Cohn are cheap plated gimcracks; he knows he doesn't have long to live; he knows his greatest accomplishment is this thunderous buffoon. Strong doesn't overplay it, but his performance and the script want us to feel a little sorry for Cohn.
But I didn't, and we shouldn't, and that's the problem with The Apprentice: the two dark stars of charisma at the center of the movie…can't be at the center of the movie, because they're both villainous buttholes and we shouldn't be asked to "side with" either of them, or for that matter with Fred Trump Sr. (Martin Donovan, laboring under a "da Bears" mustache) for thinking his middle child is a trifler.
You can't tell the story of Cohn's kingmaking of Trump without a strong POV character who is not named Cohn or Trump, in other words, and The Apprentice kind of tries to pass that buck by not settling on a POV at all; that won't work either, because then what are we doing here? Why are we revisiting a rapist bully's origin story when documentarians have already covered that ground?
The Apprentice is a watchable enough two hours with very good production design, and it's not both-sides-ing its subject, God knows – the depiction of the (alleged) rape of Ivana is the film's idea of Trump in microcosm, the almost pitiable gaucheness and self-absorption that is also capable of generating very real danger. And as I said, a calm recitation of an operatic history is something the culture needs its storytellers to be able to do. The Apprentice just needed a stronger, and more relatable, point of view, or a different framework; where a story began isn't as interesting to an audience whose fear is that that story will never end.