The Apprentice review – Demands sympathy for the devil

Review by Mark Asch @MarkAschParody

Directed by

Ali Abbasi

Starring

Jeremy Strong Maria Bakalova Sebastian Stan

Anticipation.

A biopic of one of the most heinous and ugly people on the planet. Okay, let’s see what you got.

Enjoyment.

Breaking news: Donald Trump is awful.

In Retrospect.

An exceptionally unnecessary picture.

Sebastian Stan essays a young Donald Trump in this glossy, empty film about the orange fascist’s initial dabbling in evil.

When Donald 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. Future generations, unlike mine, will have no trouble imagining how this could possibly have happened. For so long Trump was present within discourse 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?

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 unrecognisable Martin Donovan), narrates the power players in the room to his bored date. Trump is an outsider, a striver,
palpably uncomfortable – but there, through a doorway, 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 42nd 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 ambitions. 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.

The soundtrack aspires to an incongruously feel-good 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 Trump’s rape of Ivana (a scene from her divorce deposition, staged as luridly as you’d expect from the director of Holy Spider) is especially egregious. By halfway, Trump gets more flagrantly cruel, 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.

Published 18 Oct 2024

Tags: Ali Abbasi Biopic Donald Trump Jeremy Strong Sebastian Stan

Anticipation.

A biopic of one of the most heinous and ugly people on the planet. Okay, let’s see what you got.

Enjoyment.

Breaking news: Donald Trump is awful.

In Retrospect.

An exceptionally unnecessary picture.

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