Trump biopic unsparing politically but oddly sympathetic

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/10/2024 (361 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A drama based on “real events and real individuals,” The Apprentice was a hot ticket at Cannes, mostly because its central “individual” is currently a deeply divisive candidate in the U.S. presidential election.

Knowing that Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to block the release of this biopic, you might expect it to be satirical and savage, a cinematic October Surprise. Or you might dismiss it as a movie-of-the-week-style quickie, cynically eager to cash in on controversy.

In fact, The Apprentice may be uneven and a bit rambling, but Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi (The Last of Us), working from a script by journalist and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, is making an earnest attempt to explain America’s present moral moment. Part psychodrama and part social history, this is an intriguing origin story, not just of Donald Trump but of the whole Trumpy worldview.

The story is anchored in good work by Sebastian Stan (Pam & Tommy) as the young Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong (Succession) as his malevolent mentor Roy Cohn. But the film’s most indelible character might be New York City in the grotty 1970s and the flashy 1980s, awash in crime, cocaine and corruption. The Apprentice’s narrative energy eventually dwindles, but it consistently oozes ambience.

We first meet the Trumps at a cheerless family dinner in 1973. First-born son Freddie Jr. (Charlie Carrick), an airline pilot who struggles with alcoholism, is dismissed by his cold, domineering father (Blackberry’s Martin Donovan, with big eyebrows).

“My son drives a bus with wings,” says Fred Sr.

It’s left to younger son, Donald, to try to steer his father’s substantial real estate empire from Queens housing projects to the glitz of Manhattan hotels.

That’s where lawyer Roy Cohn comes in. Cohn starts by fighting charges by civil rights groups that the Trumps won’t rent to Black tenants. He becomes more than a lawyer to Donald, though, acting as mentor, advisor, fixer and surrogate father.

“I like this kid,” Cohn says. “I feel sorry for him.”

Getting Donald entrée into the backrooms and offices of New York powerbrokers, Cohn has plans to turn this “guy from Flushing” into “a guy from 5th Avenue.”

Cohn’s been played memorably before, by James Woods in Citizen Cohn and Al Pacino in Angels in America and Strong is equally mesmerizing. His Cohn is a master manipulator, with a dead-eyed, reptilian gaze and an aura of coiled, concentrated malignance.

His passes his precepts onto his young protégé. Create your own reality with hyperbole or outright lies, he says.

“America is not a nation of laws but a nation of men,” he tells Donald, and the law doesn’t matter if you can bully, bribe or blackmail the men who administer it. He deals with any problem with delays, bluster, obfuscation and evasion.

Cohn also announces his three rules, which followers of the recent American political scene will immediately recognize. The first is “attack, attack, attack.” The second is “admit nothing, deny everything.” And the third – and the most consequential for the upcoming presidential election — is “no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.”

There are some lighter moments, in Donald’s somewhat awkward courtship of his first wife, Ivana, played as a supreme pragmatist by Maria Bakalova of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, and in some brief, funny pop-ins by versions of artist Andy Warhol, Nixonian dirty trickster Roger Stone and NYC mayor Ed Koch.

Stan’s work is surprisingly subtle. This is not an obvious impersonation, partly because he’s catching Trump as a relatively young man. Though Donald does like to check his luxuriant hair, the story starts before he’s acquired a lot of the mannerisms we now associate with him, those phrases and gestures and rhetorical tics that late-night comics and Saturday Night Live performances gleefully skewer.

Trump haters might wish the film took a harder line, but Trump supporters won’t be happy about the portrayal of their dear leader as uncertain and easily influenced, beset by daddy issues, bad business decisions and bankruptcies.

What might bother Trump himself the most is the suggestion that he’s boring. The Apprentice is electrifying when Cohn is running things, but as the man becomes desperately sick and frail with AIDS, the balance of power switches over to Donald and the film’s narrative energy slumps.

Abbasi and Sherman can be unsparing in their political analysis of the tenets that become the core of Trumpism, but they can be oddly sympathetic in human terms. Ultimately, this is a portrait of a hollow man who is trying, unsuccessfully, to fill himself up.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca