When I saw The Apprentice a few weeks ago as a Fantastic Fest secret screening, star Sebastian Stan introduced the film by calling it a modern-day horror movie, and it is in fact the origin story of a type of contemporary monster. But this particular monster isn’t hungry for blood or brains or flesh; instead, it’s starving for wealth, power, adulation, and a type of validation that only an ignored son could want from his judgmental father. The film centers on the early adulthood years of Donald Trump (Stan), eager to make a name for himself in real estate circa 1970s New York in order to please his shitheel father Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), a man of no small fortune either.
But when this son doesn’t get the approval or love he needs from his father, Trump comes face to face with the devious legal mind of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair after they were convicted, with the flimsiest of evidence, of being spies. (He was also chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings.) Cohn was a self-hating, closeted gay man who died from complications of AIDS, though he maintained he had liver cancer. Before he died, he passed along a wealth of corrupting knowledge to Trump that we see in the former President’s behavior to this day.
Stan’s portrayal of Trump isn’t that man of today. He’s young, unpolished and worried too much about how he’s perceived by others. But more than that, he’s not rich and it plagues his every waking moment. The lengths that he’ll go in order to make a buck are the beginnings of the man we know today. He acts rich and knowledgable about real estate, and people listen and respond with investment dollars. But it’s in those early exchanges that Trump has with Cohn that we see the beginnings of the Trump hubris.
He begins timid, starstruck, but determined to meet and be tutored by Cohn, who teaches him the rules of being accused: never apologize, never admit that you’re wrong, and claim victories even when you've clearly lost (any of that sound familiar?). The playbook is uncannily simple, but using it causes havoc when executed precisely. Cohn uses it when walking into a restaurant, and Trump’s eyes go right to him. These are some of the film’s few moments in which Donald Trump is not in control. Even the initial reason Trump needs legal advice from Cohn involves his family's business, and he's willing to make a deal with this legal devil if it means he'll please his father in the process.
Directed by Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider), The Apprentice stays with Trump through his real estate dealings in New York and Atlantic City, showing him staying on top by not paying his workers and others he owes money to. And Cohn is there with him, paving the way and clearing legal hurdles by any means necessary, including bringing out a file of scandal-worthy photos or memos that could destroy careers.
The film also follows Trump’s love life, especially when he meets young party girl/model Ivana (Maria Bakalova), and is so taken with her that he marries her. But the courtship comes full circle once the movie builds up a head of steam, and before the end, we see the moment he stops loving her and sees her as a trophy prop to help him socialize and hobnob with important people, such as Andy Warhol and Ed Koch. Ivana was his secret weapon, and perhaps more than his other ex-wives (or the current one), he treated her reprehensibly.
This portrait of a dangerous ego expanding is sometimes shocking, but rarely more so than in the way Trump treats his immediately family, like his mother Mary Anne (Catherine McNally) and pilot brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick), a drug addict in need of a friend that Donald doesn’t have time to be, despite Freddy being a supremely supportive brother to Donald when he needs it most. Cohn’s decline is mostly background fodder for The Apprentice, but director Abbasi clearly has no qualms about going after people of power.
Stan’s transition is subtle, and it proves that he’s a much better actor than he often gets credit for. And by the end of the film, he has become the first glimpse of the Trump we know today—self-aggrandizing, womanizing, sexually dangerous, and lying every time he opens his mouth. In theory, a person like that shouldn’t be successful, but Trump deemed it necessary to keep the success machine going, even if he had to visit his dying father’s bedside and trick him into signing over the family fortune to Donald early. It’s a reprehensible moment, probably a low point in his behavior at the time. But seeing it with modern eyes, it hardly seems like the worst thing he’s ever done.
The film doesn’t deal head on with a few major moments in Trump’s life that we’ve heard about over the years (the only sexual assault that occurs in the film is with his wife, which is horrific), and the film’s timeline ends around the mid-1980s before his television fame and the time he decided to write his "instructional" book on business, The Art of the Deal. (This seems appropriate since so many of the tactics in the book were learned from Cohn, who died a year before the book came out.)
In the Marvel movies, one of the villain Thanos’s most quotable lines is “I am inevitable,” and maybe the same holds true for Donald Trump. The film posits that perhaps someone like him is something America must emdure in order to see how we come out the other side. The film will likely make you feel icky by the end, even with its somewhat empathetic view of its subject as a man who, in trying to seem worthy in the eyes of his father, went horribly astray. The Apprentice isn’t going to win him any new votes, but perhaps he’ll feel more seen, which was always his goal in the first place.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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