Review: THE APPRENTICE

 by Rob DiCristino

Witness the origin of evil.

Whether or not it’s appropriate to release a film about Donald Trump just weeks before he stands for reelection will matter more to the media programming around Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice than it will to the text of the film itself. Folks on the left who might bristle at the idea of a heroic origin story for our century’s most irredeemable pop culture personality can take heart that it is most certainly not that, while the Newsmax crowd can also rest assured that their messiah is not the subject of another hit job or witch hunt or whatever the fuck other imaginary injustice he’s victimizing himself with this week. In fact, the most provocative thing about The Apprentice might be its lack of provocation. It’s a Diet Coke of a movie, really, a perfectly serviceable biopic anchored by a compelling lead performance (in this case, Sebastian Stan’s) that tracks the rise and (moral) fall of a notable figure through an examination of a key relationship (with Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn) and/or their most damning character flaw (unbridled sociopathy). As with Trump himself, there’s little else to really examine here.

We begin in the mid 1970s, when Trump was a mere errand boy for his father’s (Martin Donovan as Fred Trump) real estate firm, cruising around the five boroughs collecting rent from the ungrateful Suckers and Losers occupying their network of apartment buildings. With Fred’s political influence on the wane and a DOJ suit against the Trump Organization’s racist business practices incoming, Trump turns to noted scumbag Roy Cohn, who agrees to take both the case and the hungry young opportunist under his wing. With Cohn’s rolodex at his disposal, Trump sets his sights on revitalizing Manhattan real estate — read: blackmailing city officials into granting tax abatements for his new hotels — and securing his place among the world’s richest and most powerful. Cohn, whose sexual proclivities are acceptable to people like Trump as long as they don’t cost any money, adores his protege’s ability to disassociate from any tangible ethical reality, to lie and cheat and steal and deny and strongarm his way into becoming one of the Reagan era’s (era’s) most iconic brands.

With its coke-fuelled opening sequence and authentically ‘80s aesthetics — including a boxy aspect ratio that recalls the cathode ray TV sets of the day — The Apprentice is deeply, unabashedly in debt to other anthems of belligerent greed like De Palma’s Scarface and Stone’s Wall Street. But whereas those films depict fantasy worlds where the corrupt are eventually brought to heel by their hubris, The Apprentice has the grand misfortune of chronicling a real figure from our shared reality, a place where the powerful are able to insulate themselves from meaningful consequences, where — as Cohn frequently reminds his young padawan — they can wrench “the truth” out of whichever hustle is most expedient for them at any given moment. And although neither Abbasi nor screenwriter Gabriel Sherman have interest — or, perhaps, talent — enough to go full Goodfellas with any of this, there is a certain sly wit to The Apprentice’s ambivalence toward its subject’s moral turpitude: Indeed, the America First crowd may actually find themselves as hypnotized by Trump’s ascent to power as any given teenage boy watching The Wolf of Wall Street for the first time. They’re missing the point, but isn’t that kind of, you know, the point?

If anything does matter in The Apprentice, if there’s anything notable about it at all, it’s probably Sebastian Stan’s ability to play Donald Trump as a human being with empathy and compassion. It’s just for the opening act, of course, as Trump can’t wait to sell his soul once things take off, but Stan lets us imagine what that man might have looked and sounded like before the liposuction and scalp reduction — in a hilarious sequence juxtaposed with Cohn’s funeral à la The Godfather — took whatever scraps of conscience still remained. Stan understands that the Trump thing is all an affect, that all the hand gestures and bloviating are practiced compensation for the lack of any intellectual interiority. Stan’s depiction is that of an id slowly taking control, of better angels being evicted with the cold indifference of, well, Donald Trump. Coupled with Jeremy Strong’s predictably sharp portrayal of a man Kendall Roy might have once aspired to be, Stan’s performance gives The Apprentice enough texture to make up for its lack of real thematic grit or technical savvy.

And again, you can understand why Abbasi and Sherman would take the middle path through this minefield, why they would make every possible effort to avoid any creative liberties that might send our most thin-skinned and litigious chief executive since Richard Nixon — whose “I am Not a Crook” speech appropriately opens the film — into one of his all-caps tizzies. The Apprentice is fairly boilerplate, a gussied-up TV movie account of all the malfeasance we’ve uncovered through interviews and magazine articles and grand jury testimonies over the last few decades. The truth is that people have largely made up their minds about Donald Trump: Some see him as a genuine American original, the embodiment of all that is good about capitalism, a principled patriot who lifted himself up by the bootstraps his dad gave him and will someday lead us all to salvation. The rest of us see what Roy Cohn eventually saw: A monster of his own design, a lusty automaton both too predictable to inspire great art and too complex for a film as lackluster as The Apprentice to effectively dissect.

The Apprentice hits theaters today, Friday, October 11th.