Jeremy Strong, left, and Sebastian Stan in a scene from the film The Apprentice.Pief Weyman/The Associated Press
- The Apprentice
- Directed by Ali Abbasi
- Written by Gabriel Sherman
- Starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan,
- Classification 14A; 122 minutes
- Opens in theatres Oct. 11
You’d think The Apprentice, a Donald Trump villain origin story, would be a lot more incendiary than it actually is, with its subject matter and the hoopla around the movie’s release. Since its Cannes premiere in May, the movie has been dogged by reports that one of its own financiers, Trump-friendly billionaire Dan Snyder, had been trying to block it and American distributors remained too gun-shy to put it in theatres. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign team sent a cease-and-desist letter, calling The Apprentice a “concoction of lies.”
Here’s the thing. The Apprentice makes some educated guesses, if only to fill in the gaps during Trump’s early days as a young, hungry and predatory real estate tycoon taking baby steps toward becoming an inflammatory head of state. But unlike its subject, The Apprentice largely sticks to documented facts. Most of the cheating, lies, greed, vanity and misogyny on display are hardly new or shocking, and rather mild compared to what’s to come.
What’s surprising though, is that in its early goings, before the movie settles into a more conventional signposting biopic immersing itself in the most soulless Trump behaviour, The Apprentice leans empathetic. Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman give us a portrait of Trump, who is played by Sebastian Stan, as a product of his environment, a neglected rich kid with a puppy dog pout, desperate for validation.
Maybe that’s what the Trump campaign fears even more: a convincing illustration of how his blustery mannerisms are rooted in petty insecurities. Or maybe they’ve been quiet, as the movie is finally making its way into theatres this week, because they got realistic about an indie film reaching across the aisle and convincing MAGA-types to vote for the Democrats. I doubt even the film’s most damning scene, depicting Trump’s alleged rape of his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) during a hostile marital spat, would change the minds of people who stood by him during the “grab them by the …” scandal.
If anything, The Apprentice may be more informative for those who repeatedly discount Trump, a reminder that he’s clever enough to know an opportunity that can be exploited, and likeable enough to convince people to help him get it.
That’s a point the film, which is shot in Toronto and co-produced by Canada’s Daniel Bekerman, makes early on, opening with a montage taking us back to New York in the early 1970s, during Trump’s coming-of-age so to speak. The Bronx is on fire. The crack epidemic scourges through the streets. Black men are under attack by police. And the trek between Times Square and Grand Central, which we see Trump waddling through, is an open-air petri dish of vices. He’s got eyes for the dilapidated Commodore hotel, which his father Fred Trump (Martin Donovan) thinks is a lousy investment because New York City real estate is in the gutter.
At the moment, Trump’s working for dad. We see him going door-to-door in Coney Island’s Trump Village (actually Toronto’s Main Square), collecting rent with a whiff of disdain for so many of his struggling tenants. And by the way, none of these tenants are Black, which is the basis for a 1973 Justice Department housing discrimination case that has the Trumps in a corner.
Things start to look up for Trump when, at an exclusive social club that welcomed him as a new member, he catches Roy Cohn’s eye. Jeremy Strong plays the notorious lawyer and fixer like some unholy amalgamation of Succession characters, as if his own Kendall Roy had successfully become kingmaker like his dad Logan (Brian Cox).
When we first spot him – at a table with mobsters Carmine Gallante and Tony Salerno – Cohn is drenched in red light, posed perfectly still and staring hypnotically at Trump as if he were fresh prey with a vampiric grin. Director Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) tends to marry his docudrama with the sensational, often with such impressionistic touches in his aesthetic.
The Apprentice is largely a two-hander between Stan’s Trump and Strong’s Cohn, with the latter becoming the father figure the former doesn’t see in his old man. In fighting Trump’s case against the Justice Department and then winning him a near-criminal tax break on the Commodore hotel, Cohn imparts the foundational lessons we still see Trump live by: always attack; deny everything; never admit defeat.
As rotten as these scenes are, there’s an inviting warmth to the Jedi master-young padawan vibe between Cohn and Trump, one that largely benefits from Strong’s performance. It’s the main show in The Apprentice, a delicate performance between bully and papa bear, where for all the ethical bankruptcy on display there seems to be a lingering moral code, a sense of loyalty that never catches with Trump.
The film drags when Strong’s Cohn is sidelined by his vapid spawn. There isn’t much nuance to afford the main character’s appetite for hotels with gold-plated walls that serve cheese balls, his aggressive entitlement towards women (which, during the rape scene, becomes horrifyingly violent) and the pompous attitude with which he stumbles into the presidency.
When we see Trump emerging Darth Vader-like from a face lift and liposuction in the movie, the empathy that made the early sections so surprising is all dried up. All that’s left is a pettiness tailor-made for this subject.