***/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan
written by Gabriel Sherman
directed by Ali Abbasi
by Bill Chambers “The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself,” the Trump Organization’s former director of social media Justin McConney told ESQUIRE in 2018, “was comparable to the moment in Jurassic Park when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors[.] I was like, ‘Oh no.'” Though it takes place before the dawn of social media as we know it, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, whose title shrewdly weaponizes Trump’s pop-culture legacy against him, is essentially about a velociraptor learning to open doors. Indeed, the weight Sebastian Stan gained to play Trump– something of an anachronism for the time period being covered (like his blonde cockscomb), perhaps to narrow the gap between Stan’s handsomeness and our calcified image of Trump as an orange tub of Vaseline in Barry Egan’s hand-me-downs–contorts his lips into a reptilian grimace that’s not inappropriate, even as it departs from the glory-hole mouth that stiffens into a rictus around other terrible people. Stan’s performance is more expressionism than impression, but I think that’s the right approach: Dead-on impersonations of Trump are a dime a dozen, and they long ago stopped revealing anything about him. They’re fun–and “fun” is how you declaw a raptor for the masses.
Stan’s Trump isn’t fun. He’s insipid and humourless, an uptight weirdo who orders ice water at a nightclub. When we first meet this version of Trump, he’s a slumlord collecting the rent. A tenant hurls a bucket of water at him he presciently dodges, telling us a lot about his survival instincts. Famously diabolical lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who Al Pacino literally portrayed in Angels in America and figuratively portrayed in Devil’s Advocate, invites Trump to sit at his table. While there are homoerotic overtones to the invitation, one suspects Cohn’s Algonquin Round Table of shit has simply run out of people to roast. But Trump lights up, to the extent a dim bulb can light up, as small talk turns to the lawsuits against him from the city and the NAACP for segregating his family’s tenement buildings and Cohn takes Trump’s side. Trump later tells him that they do rent to Black people, with only one negligible caveat: their income has to be at least four times the cost of rent. “Sounds like they’re discriminating against you,” Cohn says, stoking the persecution complex we’ve come to know so well. The lawsuit evaporates after Cohn threatens to out a councilman (James Downing) with incriminating photos. Cohn himself was, of course, gay as an Irish picnic, but he had no shame. He was also Jewish, which doesn’t stop him from venomously characterizing the Rosenbergs, who both got the death penalty thanks to his tampering with the justice system, as “pinko kikes.”
“I love this country,” Cohn says in a toast at one point. “I think of America as my most important client. Some of you are my clients, and I hate to break it to you, but America is more important. We are the last line of defense between a free world and a totalitarian hellscape.” A “totalitarian hellscape” for Cohn is the same as it is for Trump now: one where he–and, by extension, wealth–can’t flout the law with impunity. Surveying a wall of photos featuring Cohn posed alongside various luminaries, including Nixon, Trump wants to know how he’s crossed paths with so many famous people. “Everyone wants to suck a winner’s cock,” Cohn says. He lets Trump in on his three rules of winning: 1) attack attack attack; 2) admit nothing/deny everything; and 3) claim victory, no matter what. (This is Trump’s MO, from the 2020 election to his hush-money trial.) The stain of Cohn’s ‘America=me’ agenda cannot be Shout-ed out of Trump’s legacy, yet The Apprentice isn’t a Frankenstein story or even Devil’s Advocate. That would suggest if Trump had met Thurgood Marshall instead… No, Roy Cohn doesn’t create a monster; Roy Cohn gives a fellow monster the cheat codes for a morbidly successful life. They remind me of Henry and his gormless partner Otis from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, right on through to the moment where Cohn/Henry is dismayed to realize he’s dealing with a truly shameless individual.
Last week, I watched the Netflix series “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”, which promised some of the same ghoulish appeal as The Apprentice. (It’s the second instalment of an anthology that previously dramatized the killing spree of Jeffrey Dahmer.) Lyle and Erik were rich kids who murdered their parents for either shits and giggles, an inheritance, or to avenge years of sexual abuse, depending on which way the wind was blowing. I remembered them well from their ubiquitous presence in early-’90s pop culture–and loathed them. But the show reaches an emotional crescendo that’s surprisingly devastating, locating a stupid poetry in a song by our antiheroes’ favourite group, Milli Vanilli’s “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You,” as the trauma-bonded Menendez Brothers are forcibly separated, driven to different prisons to serve out their life sentences. Although it’s surely justified, as those two buses turn in opposite directions, it feels a little gratuitous–a little…cruel. The challenge of an honest Trump biopic is that he doesn’t have a mirror to reflect whatever humanity he might possess, or have once possessed. You can feel the makers of The Apprentice searching for the stupid poetry and coming up short; for me, that’s its most damning criticism of Trump. The pivotal joke of “Beavis and Butt-Head”–that for as mindless as Beavis and Butt-Head are, it’s everybody else who looks idiotic for refusing to believe their words and actions could be completely devoid of deeper meaning–is how we as a society have chosen to reconcile being taken by the lowest of low-rent con men. The Apprentice–and it’s about fucking time–takes Trump at face value. It left me depressed, but I was going to be depressed anyway.
Trump desperately pursues and finally marries Czech model Ivana Zelníčková (the great Maria Bakalova, who resurfaces every four years to upset the U.S. election); helps gentrify downtown Manhattan (which is really about branding New York like prize cattle); and starts gobbling up casinos in Atlantic City. Cohn determines his star client is hastily overspending and voices his concerns, but Trump detects a note of paternalism and chafes at the thought of having two disapproving fathers when the odious Fred Trump (Martin Donovan at his most dynamic since Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady) is already one too many. The emotions ring true here but the scene rings false, Trump openly and vulnerably expressing his frustrations to Cohn in such Freudian terms. Still, it epitomizes Trump’s perpetually thwarted acquisition of respect, something even the U.S. presidency couldn’t secure for him. He’s got the Fredo stink on him. It’s how he’s become the sock puppet of the far right: they call him Mr. Trump, Mr. President; they kiss the ring. They suck the winner’s cock.
Sebastian’s Trump sits in the cradle of luxury, not appreciating any of it. He gets hooked on amphetamines–“vitamins”–and boasts to Cohn that he no longer needs sleep, but to what end? He seems to rape his wife out of sheer boredom. What’s clear is that he’s one rich guy you’d never want to be, because he doesn’t know how to be rich. He’s all appetite, no joy. (See: Trump getting a blowjob.) There’s no real pulling of punches here, though The Apprentice would be an impotent troll if it didn’t cohere as cinema. I like that it’s shot at Academy ratio, so that Trump doesn’t get to escape the dimensions of television, and I like that it resembles a pastiche of The Godfather, just like Trump’s life. I wish Ivana’s role in his ascent were clearer; Trump complains at one point that he wants a wife, not a business partner, but we barely see her as either. The picture both squanders Bakalova and adds insult to the injury of Ivana’s burial on the first hole at Bedminster. And I wish there were fewer “Picasso-in-Titanic” historical ironies, such as when Cohn calls him a thoroughbred, or when a young Roger Stone (Mark Rendall) gives Trump a “Let’s Make America Great Again” button leftover from Reagan’s first presidential campaign. But it’s impeccably acted across the board, and it can be a mordantly funny reminder that Trump is beyond parody. A hilarious early scene sees Trump meeting Andy Warhol (Bruce Beaton) at one of Cohn’s parties and not knowing who he is (“Are you successful?” Trump asks him) but believing he’s found a kindred spirit because of Warhol’s venal commercialism. I love that the climax of Trump’s very own Young Mr. Lincoln intercuts Cohn’s funeral with Trump getting liposuction and a scalp reduction, almost as if, with his buffer gone, he’s having the last vestiges of his soul extracted from his body. It’s not like you need one to work the doors.
