There is a somewhat justified aversion in the United States to understanding Donald Trump. Unlike our morbid fascination with understanding what makes serial killers tick, most Americans – even the ones who elected Trump as President in 2016 – aren’t too interested in learning how and why a New York real estate nepo baby became the infamous narcissist and opportunistic tyrant now running for a second term. The Apprentice, from Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbassi (Border, Holy Spider), answers that question by way of examining Trump’s relationship with New York prosecutor Roy Cohn, the man who made the monster.
Just after his incredible performance in A Different Man, actor Sebastian Stan, best known to audiences as Marvel’s Bucky Barnes, portrays Trump throughout the ’70s and ’80s, from his early career managing racially segregated family housing in New York through his lofty plans to remodel the historical Commodore Hotel (and the controversial $400 million tax abatement he secured from the city) and eventually build Trump Tower.
A Strange Comedy About Aggressively Hollow Men
We spend little time alone with Trump before he meets Roy Cohn, a powerful prosecutor on the verge of entering his political fixer era, who hesitantly agrees to take Trump on as a client. Played by Jeremy Strong, Cohn is a cruel, apathetic schemer who takes pleasure in blackmailing political figures. As he advises his new protégé, Cohn has three rules to ensure he always stays winning: attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; and no matter what happens, you must claim victory and never concede defeat.
The first half of The Apprentice has the look and occasionally the vibe of an SNL Digital Short expanded to feature length. The tone is darkly comedic, thanks in large part to Strong’s gleefully repellent take on Cohn, a closeted gay man who aligned himself with conservatives and served as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. In public, Cohn was virulently homophobic, but in private, he seemed to think that having sex with men was actually proof that his was an enlightened and superior masculinity. It’s difficult to describe Strong’s portrayal of Cohn as anything other than c*nty – that eccentric blend of cold, cruel, and self-serving that fits the sinister gay trope to a T.
Stan, meanwhile, plays Trump as something of a blank slate. He’s ambitious, certainly, but The Apprentice validates an assumption shared by many of Trump’s detractors: under the elaborate combover and obnoxious bluster, there’s no there there. The closest Abbassi and Sherman get to depicting Trump as a recognizable human being is in his relationship with his brother, Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick), an alcoholic airline pilot resented by their father, Fred Sr. (Martin Donovan, quietly giving one of the best performances). As in real life, however, the fictional Trump aggressively rejects his vulnerabilities, immediately dismissing any emotions or inclinations that could be seen as weaknesses.
A Necessarily Unconventional Film
Written by Gabriel Sherman, journalist and author of the Roger Ailes biography The Loudest Voice in the Room, Abbassi’s biopic of Donald Trump smartly takes the less conventional route – not that it could do anything else, given that a traditional biopic of such an infamous figure, let alone one who is still alive and quite relevant, would be perceived as too compassionate toward a figure seemingly incapable of returning the courtesy.
It’s not that The Apprentice is trying to show us that there’s something more to Trump, that perhaps at one point there was a human being stuffed inside the overly self-tanned sack of bones and flesh. Even if he was a compassionate person in his youth, knowing as much wouldn’t do any good at this point in history.
From Cynically Funny to Unforgettably Disturbing
Around the halfway point, The Apprenticetakes a jarring turn and transitions from a darkly comedic character study into a deeply unsettling horror film. Some years into his marriage to Czechoslovakian model Ivana (Maria Bakalova), Trump reveals that he is no longer attracted to her, spurring an intense argument that culminates in a harrowing rape scene.
It isn’t entirely unexpected, but the decision to refrain from depicting Trump’s predatory sexual behaviors (alleged and otherwise) up until this point gives the second half of the film an audacious quality. The horrific rape of Ivana, which the real-life former Mrs. Trump detailed in her divorce deposition, is necessary only in the sense that the audience needs to be reminded – after an hour of cynical laughter – that this man isn’t just a typical wealthy a**hole.
The fact of the matter is that Donald Trump is so willfully delusional, arrogant, and ignorant that he inevitably says things that are funny. Not funny like a good sitcom punchline, or funny like a cringe-worthy dad joke. Donald Trump exists at the darker end of the comedic spectrum, and the laughter he elicits is most comparable to gallows humor, the reflexive urge to cope with the absolute worst moments in our lives by making light of them. In doing so, we forget that Donald Trump has been accused of sexually assaulting dozens of women – a fact often ignored in media coverage because it’s simply too upsetting to contend with the idea that Americans elected a man who was caught on a hot mic boasting about forcing himself on women.
The Apprentice Captures the Essence of Donald Trump
From that point in the film, Stan’s Trump quickly calcifies into the Trump we recognize, and The Apprentice increasingly takes the shape of a horror film. Some of the more melodramatic scenes have an almost self-parodic quality that feels tonally at odds with the unsettling vibe, but like the rape scene and subsequent pivot, this also seems intentional.
Abbassi and Sherman may not be able to locate the human side of Trump (if there is one; it’s distressing to think that these inhuman qualities actually make him exceedingly human), but they have effectively captured the intangible essence of Trump as a public figure. More impressively, The Apprentice pulls off the great magic trick of evoking a specific feeling through the alchemy of cinema.
Living in the time of Trump feels a lot like watching The Apprentice: we’re laughing because everything about this shameless, cruel narcissist feels absurd and surreal, until we’re violently reminded of who – and what – he is. It shouldn’t be so easy to forget. The Apprentice was most recently screened at Fantastic Fest. Briarcliff Entertainment will release the film theatrically on Oct. 11, 2024, in the United States.
