Written by Tom Augustine.

I confess it would certainly be nice to never think about Donald Trump again. Leaving this heinous election cycle aside, when it comes to the arts in general, confronting the spectre of this monstrous manifestation of the American id has long been an incredibly fraught proposition. Enough ink has been spilled on the fact that Trump has made satire, normal parameters of decency and political prognosticating essentially useless in the modern age, enough that I won’t add to it here. Enough has also been said in general about how Trump is a deeply evil person – which he is – but one whose evil stands in such brash opposition to the politer, more deeply ingrained brand of evil that most have become accustomed to in the United States’ supposedly democratic political system, that he’s been able to fool millions of people into thinking he’s for them simply by being unapologetic about his nature. You don’t need to hear it from me – but do we need to hear it in our films, our books, our music? Why do we cringe whenever an artist tries to speak meaningfully about the man? Have we become so divided that any work that does speak to Trumpism will only ever be heard by people who already despise it?

 

If there’s anyone who doesn’t need a biopic, it’s Donald Trump. At this point he has so saturated the culture, reforming it in his own hellish image, that we all know who he is to a pretty decent certainty. Here’s the thing: Trump’s psychology is so remarkably shallow that so much of who he is is right there on the surface. You can know what there is to know about the man by listening to him speak for two minutes. What Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice posits, compellingly, is that this facade was constructed in another’s image. It seeks to understand what it was that transformed an ambitious, headstrong little rich boy into the self-preservational fascist that he is today. As it turns out, it was simply an act of cultivation on the part of his mentor, slimy high-powered lawyer Roy Cohn, who star Jeremy Strong has described as ‘one of the most evil men of the 20th Century’. In presenting this assertion, Abassi has already done something impressive – he’s made Trump’s story layered, again, if only for a brief moment. It’s a strange trick, because the process by which Donald, as played by Sebastian Stan, becomes Trump is a process of paring away his more intricate definitions, shaving off the parts of him that are recognisably human – or at least, human in a way that doesn’t cater to what is most base within us. Abassi, perhaps rightly, has located in Trump the true American story – the resulting film, The Apprentice, is not necessarily a great story in itself, but it’s a journey that proves engaging at the least.

 

Iranian-Danish director Abassi is an interesting candidate for this story, a perhaps unexpected choice considering the high-profile of any attempt to tell the story of Trump in the cinematic form. Abassi broke through with Border, a magical realist fantasy, following up with Holy Spider, which tackled the true story of an Iranian serial killer who aimed to ‘cleanse’ the world of sex workers. Abassi’s work has never been especially subtle, an element that is probably useful in approaching this most unsubtle of figures, but it’s Abassi’s interest in plunging into the most extreme darknesses of his stories that is his most important feature as an artist. This approach didn’t work in Holy Spider, a film so committed to its own ugliness that its social reflections became muddied and obscured. It crossed that discomfiting borderline, where its commitment to the gruesomeness betrayed a less than flattering aspect of the director’s own intentions to upend patriarchal violence. There is less violence in The Apprentice (save for one hideous sequence of sexual assault) which allows Abassi to work within the realm of emotional and gendered violence, tracing a story of inevitability across a gaudy late-70s and 80s fantasia of all-American excess. It also allows for Abassi’s formal technique to shine, which is one of The Apprentice’s finest elements. Abassi daringly opts for period-specific filming styles, depicting the late Seventies in grainy film stock evocative of so many great New York-set films from the era, and the Eighties sequences with old-school videotape, a conceptual gambit that works exceptionally well. The Apprentice is not necessarily a fun movie, but it’s fun to watch Abassi play with these formats with such aplomb.

Hot off a silencing attempt from the Trump campaign, Holy Spider director Ali Abassi’s profile of the rise of Donald Trump under the mentorship of svengali lawyer Roy Cohn makes for a compelling, if only skin-deep examination of the corrosive effects of capitalism on the soul. Led by two exceptional performances from Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, it’s a less-accomplished Wolf of Wall Street that nevertheless reminds us of the monstrous capabilities of the one-time President.

We first see Trump as a young real estate wannabe, utilising his family connections to get into an exclusive social club and generally ignoring the date he’s dragged along on pretence. In one of the film’s most mesmerising images, we witness Strong’s Cohn watching Trump across a crowded room, lit like Vito Corleone, or perhaps Satan, observing with an intoxicating mix of desire, fascination and something like God-given foresight. Cohn immediately takes Trump under his wing, first taking on a case in which the Trump family have been accused of racially segregating their apartment buildings (which they have) and slowly starting to coax the ‘killer’ out of Trump deal by deal. Particularly with these two figures, the lure of caricature must be strong, but both leads are genuinely exceptional in their craft here, as they portray figures of oppositional fortunes. Strong, as Cohn, starts the film as something monstrous, larger-than-life, and then slowly chips away at the facade to reveal something that would be tragic if we didn’t know the depth of Cohn’s criminality. One feels for Cohn in the later section of the film, which is something I didn’t imagine myself being able to say. Stan, meanwhile, shows the transition of a deeply flawed human willingly contorting himself into a monster, one, The Apprentice shows cunningly and consistently, that is built around Cohn’s teaching and even his very persona. 

 

Strong, in his most high-profile role since the end of Succession, is at home in this world, even though Cohn is far different to the doomed man-child that is Kendall Roy. That doesn’t mean the performance isn’t enthralling – indeed, my eyes were drawn to him whenever he slunk on-screen. Stan, though, continues his hot streak over the past few years with another turn that reveals previously unseen depths. Evidently tired of the Marvel machine, Stan has proved to be quite the fascinating performer, particularly in 2024 between this and A Different Man, one of the best films of the year. Everyone has a Trump impression and yet Stan’s here doesn’t feel too much like an impression. Instead, it’s a performance, one of great control – a slight cock of the head or a pursing of the lips is enough to bring out astonished laughs from the crowd. All of a sudden, the Trump we know appears across Stan’s face like magic. Their performances, as well as Maria Bakalova as Trump’s first wife Ivana, ensure that The Apprentice remains deeply watchable, even as creeping concerns about Abassi’s capability in landing the damn thing begin to appear. 

 

Even jam-packed with event and action, The Apprentice continues to run up against the question – who is this film for? Abassi has clear aspirations to craft something in the vein of Martin Scorsese’s modern masterwork The Wolf of Wall Street, though he has neither the directorial chops nor the steady hand to pull off a magic trick of the same esteem. There is the same excess, tacky glamour, hedonism and cruelty as Wolf, but Abassi struggles between his desire to capture the same miasmic energy as that film and his need to portend the grim future we find ourselves in. That ugliness that so derailed Holy Spider is here as well, and so too is Abassi’s barely contained eagerness to indulge in it. What made Scorsese’s film work was that he released any such containment – he trusted his audience to be able to enjoy watching what makes someone into Jordan Belfort, and recognised that indulging in his lifestyle was something that could be done in a movie theatre without then carrying it out into the world. It’s hard to argue that Abassi makes a case for Trump or endorses him or his actions – a profound feeling of disgust settles in pretty early on and refuses to leave – and I don’t necessarily see the harm in a film that humanises one of the greatest of modern villains. But one wonders what can be gleaned from The Apprentice that we don’t already know. The Trump supporter could largely watch this film and dismiss it, while avowed Trump haters could watch it and feel assured in their rightful disdain. Perhaps the most damning thing about The Apprentice is not that it reflects poorly on Trump, which is easy to do, but that it largely shrugs its shoulders about the conditions in the world that allowed a figure like Trump to conquer it. Even in a film that features Trump betraying and abandoning his closest friend, cheating people out of their homes and livelihoods, stealing from the working citizen, and sexually assaulting his wife, it feels like he gets off easy – and so do we.

The Apprentice is in cinemas now.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TRAILER

The Apprentice

Movie title: The Apprentice (Abbasi, 2024)

Movie description: Hot off a silencing attempt from the Trump campaign, Holy Spider director Ali Abassi’s profile of the rise of Donald Trump under the mentorship of svengali lawyer Roy Cohn makes for a compelling, if only skin-deep examination of the corrosive effects of capitalism on the soul. Led by two exceptional performances from Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, it’s a less-accomplished Wolf of Wall Street that nevertheless reminds us of the monstrous capabilities of the one-time President.

Date published: October 10, 2024

Country: United States

Author: Gabriel Sherman

Director(s): Ali Abbasi

Actor(s): Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova

Genre: Docudrama, Political Drama, Biography, Drama

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