by Julian Wood
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally
Intro:
... brave, beautifully put together and has an epic story to tell ...
Have you heard of a guy called Donald Trump? Before informing us about the supposed dietary habits of Haitian immigrants in the US and becoming President (again), he used to be an over-ambitious real estate developer, and the host of a popular reality TV show called The Apprentice, which this movie chooses as its apt title.
The film concentrates on his ambitions during the 1980s. Ali (Border, Holy Spider) Abbasi’s film, based on a screenplay by Gabriel Sherman (The Loudest Voice), cannot be consumed as a straightforward biopic in the Hollywood tradition, though this is the genre it tucks under. It’s a weird terrain for fiction, but then again, Trump’s life is partly fictionalised already.
The Apprentice does some things very well. Its recreation of 1980s New York is convincing and cinematic. The yellowy palette and the grain of the image are so well done that at times you are lulled into thinking that you are seeing documentary footage from the era. But it shows things that were (thankfully) never filmed, though if they were, they may have exposed Trump a lot earlier, and he may not have risen to POTUS. Or maybe he would have, who knows in these post-truth daze?
The Donald’s relations to women is clearly a strand that Abbasi feels is illustrative of his ego-driven, sub-maniacal way of being. His courtship of Ivana (Maria Bakalova) is tellingly depicted. He pursues her with a mixture of brashness and puppy dog devotion, only to become less interested once he has secured the prize. Her famously icy response to all this is also well caught. This is perhaps one of the central messages of the film, that Trump is not really interested in anything except himself and vainglory. The list of things he is no longer interested in gets longer and longer, but his habit of honing his predatory instincts continues. The thrill of the chase, and of bragging about his achievements, become his raison d’etre. Some might regard this point as so obvious that it doesn’t need ramming home.
The narrative mainly traces the long relationship Trump had with Roy Cohn (a brilliant turn from Jeremy Strong). Cohn exerted a Svengali-like influence over the then-naïve Donald and taught him the so-called three golden rules. As a person, Cohn is interesting in a reptilian kind of way. The sexual politics of the era are also highly relevant. Cohn lived a life of private excess, but the AIDS crisis forced his hand. The scenes with Trump at the end of that relationship – though who knows if they really took place – provide the few moments of poignancy in the otherwise surfaces-only world they seem to inhabit.
The portrayal of Trump by Sebastian Stan is central and has to carry the film. He starts off as more obviously shallow and pretentious but acquires superficial gloss later. The verbal ticks and the tendency to sloganize and bullshit come more and more to the fore in a way that rounds out the portrait and takes it beyond the level of mere impersonation.
When all said and done, this is a hard film to like due to the nasty characters at its core. But who said that should be the criteria for a film’s success? The Apprentice is brave, beautifully put together and has an epic story to tell; it is also prophetic, makes you think and leaves you with a bittersweet feeling about the future of the world that we live in. The real-life narrative is of course unfinished, we can only hope that Trump’s fate is similar to the likes of Roy Cohn, or in cinematic terms, another American mogul, Charles Foster Kane, only this time, the sled is Roy Cohn.
