Is there a way to make a Donald Trump biopic interesting or insightful? And is there even an audience for such a film? These are the two existential questions faced by Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, a study of the former (and perhaps imminent) President’s, perhaps the most famous and certainly most divisive man in the western world, origins in ‘70s and ‘80s New York. If we go by its dismal-so-far US box office returns, the answer to the latter question is a pretty simple and definitive no, but the first is more elusive. The Apprentice is not a particularly enlightening piece of work, but there is some slick and sleazy entertainment to be found in Trump’s rise to infamy.
Sebastian Stan reaches the logical conclusion of his penchant for taking on only the skeeviest roles outside of his MCU work by playing Trump, and he’s pretty damn good here. Though he doesn’t quite do The Voice that we’ve all become agonisingly familiar with over the past decade, he looks the part and does really capture the mannerisms, which become more and more for-the-cameras flamboyant as Trump rises to fame, getting TV airtime and losing whatever shreds of humanity might have been left in him in his pursuit of endless ‘winning’.
Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman never paint Trump as anything other than a vain, petty, and horrible man, but this isn’t a full SNL-style send-up. Especially in the film’s (much better) first half, there’s an earnestness in his portrayal – this is a human being who is awful, but is still a human being, not yet the deranged cartoon that so dominates world news now. It helps that the ‘70s is the most (maybe only?) dramatically interesting time in Trump’s life, the last time he lacked full control over his fate or wasn’t hermetically sealed from any real consequences for his actions.
As iconic a figure as he strikes (already with the iconic silhouette of his insane hair), though, Trump is outshone constantly by Jeremy Strong as the savagely effective and underhanded lawyer Roy Cohn, who was Trump’s attorney, mentor, attack dog, and (here at least) second father. As you’d expect, Strong is just tremendous in this role, slathered in ridiculous tan and oozing a grotesque confidence, often hunchedly leaning over proceedings like Shakespeare’s Richard III, until the monster he makes in Trump finally, inevitably, eats him too.
Given the subject matter, Abbasi really leans in to all of his nastiest instincts as a filmmaker and the results are mixed. The gross and frenetic energy of New York’s dilapidation in the ‘70s is well captured with grainy cinematography and deafeningly loud music cues, but the very earnestly miserable treatment of women feels at odds with a lot of the wink-wink humour elsewhere. From a really nasty rape scene involving Trump’s first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) to a gratuitously mean-spirited blowjob sequence, Trump’s real-life misogyny bleeds not just into his character, but into the filmmaking too. Maybe such a result was inevitable but, especially given Abbasi’s aggressively bad-taste work in portraying the real victims of a serial killer in Holy Spider, it does smack of something a little more darkly gleeful. We know what kind of a man Donald Trump is, and there is nothing really to be learned from The Apprentice, but the two full-bore leading performances grant it some undeniable weight and propulsion.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 