The Appren­tice – first-look review

Did you know Don­ald Trump is in Paris Is Burn­ing? No, real­ly: in Jen­nie Livingston’s seis­mic doc­u­men­tary on New York’s queer ball­room scene, an inde­pen­dent film about peo­ple at the mar­gins, there’s an insert shot of a Forbes mag­a­zine cov­er: ​“What I Learned in the 80s” is the cov­er fea­ture, and right under­neath it, back row cen­ter in an illus­tra­tion of var­i­ous one-per­centers lumi­nar­ies, there he is, in between check-ins with Willi Nin­ja and Venus Xtravaganza.

When Trump was elect­ed Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States in 2016, so much of Amer­i­can cul­ture became ret­ro­spec­tive­ly seed­ed with East­er eggs fore­shad­ow­ing his even­tu­al ascent to the seat of pow­er; future gen­er­a­tions, unlike mine, will have no trou­ble imag­in­ing how this could pos­si­bly have hap­pened. For so long Trump was present with­in dis­cours­es on busi­ness, crime, race, and pol­i­tics; he was in Home Alone 2 and had a show on NBC; he was a late-night talk-show punch­line and appeared at Wrestle­ma­nia. He was so ubiq­ui­tous, for so long — how could he not have become President?

The point I want to make here is that there is very lit­tle we don’t know about Don­ald Trump; his rise to the White House was accom­pa­nied and indeed fueled by wall-to-wall cov­er­age across all forms of media, which dur­ing his (first) term as Pres­i­dent enjoyed a boom in read­er­ship and rev­enues — there was always anoth­er arti­cle break­ing anoth­er new scan­dal, or unearthing anoth­er embar­rass­ing episode from his past that had been hid­ing in plain sight all along.

It is, then, very dif­fi­cult to make a movie that has some­thing new to say about Don­ald Trump, that tells a new sto­ry or shows a new side of the most famous per­son — prob­a­bly — you’re not sup­posed to say this — but they’re say­ing — many peo­ple are say­ing — he’s the most famous per­son, frankly, that we’ve ever seen, and we’re see­ing him more and more. The task before The Appren­tice — a biopic telling the sto­ry of Trump’s rise in the New York real estate world in the 70s and 80s, abet­ted by the noto­ri­ous fix­er Roy Cohn — is there­fore a for­mi­da­ble one, and it’s not a task to which direc­tor Ali Abbasi and screen­writer Gabriel Sher­man prove remote­ly equal.

The film begins in New York City, in the 70s, at an exclu­sive mem­bers’ club where Trump (Sebas­t­ian Stan), the twen­tysome­thing son of out­er­boro slum­lord Fred (an unrec­og­niz­able Mar­tin Dono­van), rest­less­ly nar­rates the pow­er play­ers in the room to his bored date; Trump is an out­sider, a striv­er, pal­pa­bly uncom­fort­able — but there, through a door­way, doing the Kubrick Stare, is Roy Cohn, for­mer Joe McCarthy aide dur­ing the the Red Scare of the 1950s and infa­mous lawyer for mob­sters and oth­er pow­er play­ers, pub­licly revealed after his death from AIDS to be a clos­et­ed gay man. Cohn takes an inter­est in Trump, and smooths the wheels for his first big deal, the over­haul of the old Com­modore on Manhattan’s then-decrepit 42^nd Street.

For the first hour of the film, Stan’s Trump is, delib­er­ate­ly, not the man we know today: his voice has a slight Queens bray, but he avoids all the caricaturist’s tics, mur­murs soft­ly and almost ten­der­ly at times, even when describ­ing his ambi­tious. Stan plays him as he’s writ­ten, ner­vous and unformed and frankly sym­pa­thet­ic, gen­uine­ly drawn to Ivana (Maria Bakalo­va) for her ambi­tions, a finicky and unschooled naïf wan­der­ing around Cohn’s deca­dent par­ties avoid­ing the drugs and gay sex. He’s a would-be shark so doughy and vague as to be almost sym­pa­thet­ic, like the bud­ding young Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tor of Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien.

Trump’s rela­tion­ship with Cohn was wide­ly report­ed on dur­ing his pres­i­den­cy, so much so that Cohn — a fig­ure noto­ri­ous enough to have been played by James Woods in a TV movie in the 1990s, and Al Paci­no in the HBO minis­eries of the Pulitzer-win­ning Angels in Amer­i­ca — has been ret­conned as pri­mar­i­ly Trump’s men­tor; a fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary about him is titled Where’s My Roy Cohn?, after an Oval Office lament. So it’s not exact­ly news­wor­thy that the film cred­its Cohn with teach­ing Trump to affect a brash­ness and flair and to learn to attack, deny, and dom­i­nate the nar­ra­tive — nor are these par­tic­u­lar nov­el insights into Trump.

The almost sym­pa­thet­ic cast of the film’s first hour is, I sup­pose, a fresh per­spec­tive, but equal­ly an offen­sive and shal­low one, dri­ven less by any par­tic­u­lar insight into the per­verse incen­tives of Amer­i­can soci­ety — the film is remark­ably insu­lar, shot large­ly on sound­stage recre­ations of the Trump home in Jamaica Estates, the pent­house in Trump Tow­er, the backs of var­i­ous limos and the offices of var­i­ous pow­er bro­kers — than by the dic­tates of a char­ac­ter arc in which Cohn and Fred are obvi­ous­ly posit­ed as polar oppo­site father fig­ures, demand­ing and com­pet­i­tive men after whom Don­ald mod­els him­self and whose approval he seeks.

A num­ber of things change at the film’s halfway mark. The film switch­es from a cel­lu­loid to a dig­i­tal look — through­out, Abassi and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Kasper Tux­en ape the peri­od of the action, from seamy red-tint­ed nar­row-gauge for the grit­ty 70s to a bleary pix­e­lat­ed look that improves through­out the 80s — a ges­ture that would give the film an appeal­ing momen­tum and raw tex­ture were the nar­ra­tive not so wed­ded to the his­tor­i­cal record, with cutesy cameos from Warhol and Rupert Mur­doch, and know­ing ref­er­ences to the Trump Tow­er ele­va­tors, MAGA, and oth­er future fea­tures of Amer­i­can life. Stock-footage mon­tages exposit the eras’ his­tor­i­cal con­text via pot­ted his­to­ries of New York City, with an unclear point of view on the cycle of urban decline and rebirth in the post­war era: though light­ly in quo­ta­tion marks, they also seem objec­tive accounts of a gen­er­al his­tor­i­cal record that gives cre­dence to the nar­ra­tive of White Flight – era NYC as ​“Fear City” (an image of law­less­ness Trump long exploit­ed, first as a devel­op­er and then as a dem­a­gogue), and of the go-go Rea­gan 80s, the decade in which Trump applied all of what he learned in the 70s, and of which he became an avatar.

At this point in the film, Stan’s dia­logue takes on the famil­iar turns of phrase, the ver­bal and phys­i­cal man­ner­isms: the diet pill— the pursed lips, the overe­nun­ci­a­tion and the­atri­cal hand ges­tures, the addled mile-a-minute grandiose rants and flip­pant dis­missals and breath­tak­ing glib­ness and odd­ly matron­ly cat­ti­ness. It’s fun­ny, but hard­ly vir­gin ter­ri­to­ry the years we’ve spent enjoy­ing the work of come­di­ans like James Austin John­son and that one friend of yours who sends you voice mem­os in the Trump voice talk­ing about the dis­cours­es of the day, imper­son­ators who reshape the news by push­ing the man’s implic­it grotes­query and absur­di­ty to the fore.

This Trump gets more fla­grant­ly cru­el to Ivana, delu­sion­al, thin-skinned and aggres­sive. It’s the kind of charis­mat­ic antihero’s jour­ney that might fly in a Scors­ese film — arguably the ulti­mate Trump film is The Wolf of Wall Street — but Abassi and Sherman’s take on the mate­r­i­al is large­ly duti­ful. The sound­track aspires to an incon­gru­ous­ly feel-good high-ener­gy loose­ness that the film doesn’t back up. I’ve nev­er been unhap­pi­er to hear Sui­cide, Pet Shop Boys or New Order, and the smash cut and nee­dle drop that takes us out of after Trump’s rape of Ivana (a scene from her divorce depo­si­tion, staged as lit­er­al­ly and lurid­ly as you’d expect from the direc­tor of Holy Spi­der) is espe­cial­ly egregious.

Maybe there’s sup­posed to be a larg­er point about Trump’s polit­i­cal move­ment in the way that he’s shown to aban­don Cohn as his for­mer mentor’s legal aides and health woes pile up, but Cohn recedes from the nar­ra­tive in the sec­ond half of the film, which is much less ground­ed in their rela­tion­ship; though as Cohn weak­ens from a virus he stead­fast­ly denied, the sec­ond hour is his turn to be por­trayed more sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly than he deserves.

Strong has the same prob­lem in his per­for­mance as Stan, in that Cohn is almost as media-sat­u­rat­ed a fig­ure as Trump. Strong gives Cohn a low, aggres­sive voice, slight­ly nasal and round­ed, with casu­al and cru­el inflec­tions tossed out at a Suc­ces­sion-trained tem­po; he bobs his neck up and down like a tur­tle on each syl­la­ble, but holds it for­ward ten­ta­tive­ly as if the mus­cles are atro­phy­ing, as Cohn becomes frail­er. It’s a cred­i­ble per­for­mance, not remote­ly campy, but not real­ly any­thing — there’s noth­ing here like the per­spec­tive on the role as inter­pret­ed by, say, the under­ground the­ater leg­end Ron Vawter in his per­for­mance piece Roy Cohn/​Jack Smith, in which he gave Cohn a shrill, minc­ing Jew­ish voice, flaunt­ing the traits most con­cealed and loathed by his recent­ly deceased subject.

Rec­og­niz­able fig­ures are a fun chal­lenge for actors, as well as for the hair, make­up, and wardrobe depart­ments tasked with recre­at­ing icon­ic looks that every­one remem­bers from recent his­to­ry. This year, elec­tion sea­son is also Oscar-movie sea­son, and you can expect some atten­tion from the crafts teams on The Appren­tice and maybe Strong or Sher­man (one of the many glossy-mag­a­zine jour­nal­ists to enjoy an ele­vat­ed pro­file since the Trump years). I’m sure their accep­tance speech­es will be full of right­eous anger direct­ed at the new administration.