“Listen, here, I don’t need your money. You pay me back with your friendship, quid pro quo, you be a friend to me, I be a friend to you, okay? That’s the pact.”
There are many movies that come out each year where I can’t help but wonder who exactly the target audience is for that particular film. It’s often things like Dark Shadows or Welcome to Marwen, where there simply exists no substantial cross-section of the population guaranteed to enjoy the movie. Director Ali Abbasi’s new film The Apprentice seems to suffer from this same problem, as any film covering any portion of the life of Donald Trump is sure to have folks lining up on both sides.
Only, that’s not really the case here. If anything, the film seems to be uniting Trump supporters with the rest of the sane world in asking, “who is this movie for?” I don’t know if there’s an answer to this question, but let’s dig in and see if we can’t figure it out for ourselves. We open the film with Sebastian Stan playing a thirty-something Trump like the marginally unlikeable protagonist of a shitty rom-com.
As an exclusive member of a social club in Manhattan, Trump crosses paths with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) who takes a liking to the young wannabe real estate developer. Taking Trump under his wing, Cohn instills in him the three core values that have helped him attain power, respect, and fear. Rule one: attack, attack, attack. Rule two: Deny everything and admit to nothing. And Rule three: no matter the outcome, always claim victory, never admit defeat.
The first half of the film shows Trump trying, and often failing, to make an impression, while Cohn tries to mold this pitiful creature in his own image. He soon learns that Trump is his own man, particularly when he begins romantically pursuing a fashion model named Ivana (a terrific, if underused Maria Bakalova). Like a drill sergeant, Cohn continues to press these lessons on his protege, while also watching him morph and pervert the lessons to suit his own ends.
The Apprentice is ultimately every bit as unsuccessful as Oliver Stone’s W. and Adam McKay’s Vice, but for completely different reasons—and apologies to any fans of those films, go ahead and give this one a shot, I guess. This film is far more salacious than those certainly and features performances that range from surprisingly thoughtful and loaded with depth all the way to the energy of an SNL sketch being performed for only the second time live on air.
The movie is a mess only because of a conscious decision to take the second hour in the direction it does. Anyone who has been paying attention for the last however many years knows where Trump ended up and who he ended up becoming. Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman—whose only other feature film screenwriting credit is Independence Day: Resurgence of all things—can’t wait to get rid of this incarnation of Trump and get on to the real stuff.
Around the halfway point, the film jumps to 1980 and suddenly Trump is more or less the fully formed aggressive salesman he spent the first part of the film struggling to become. For my money, that struggle is probably where the really interesting stuff happened, but this film chose to keep that transition and all of that potentially interesting stuff off screen.
When we finally, mercifully reach a laughably on-the-nose final scene where Trump meets for the first time with the man who will ghostwrite his book “The Art of the Deal,” it’s every bit the cliché-riddled scene you’d figure a movie like this would end on. Don’t be surprised if a more robust audience than the one at my screening inspires a Peter Griffin-esque comedian to chime in around the time the book’s title is pitched. Honestly, most of the humor in this film is no different than all of those jokes in The Wedding Singer where sly late 90s knowledge of 80s pop culture is peppered throughout for cheap laughs.
Thankfully the film isn’t shameless enough to make Trump or Cohn sympathetic characters—Bakalova’s Ivana is maybe the only sympathetic character in the movie. Giving Cohn multiple Dr. Frankenstein “what have I created?” moments, however, seems like a step toward understanding the impenetrable. However, much like gazing into the metaphorical abyss, you end up looking for answers where there are none.
Knowing everything I know about the man, I can’t shed a tear for Roy Cohn, even when his best friend betrays him repeatedly at his lowest point. Part of what makes Strong’s performance so good is that he manages to find interesting things to play while portraying a man who thought that showing any kind of emotion was the biggest cardinal sin. What could’ve been one note hammered on a piano for two hours is thankfully afforded more nuance by Strong.
Sebastian Stan really has a grasp on the character in the early goings and plays him like an actual human being for the better part of an hour. His puppy dog earnestness makes him impossible to hate, even if you can’t stand the sight of him, so that’s quite a feat. My issue is that Stan seems all too happy to drop all of that in the back half of the film and lean into the more cartoonish aspects of the standard-issue Trump impression. It’s a good performance but it lacks nuance, particularly in that interminable last hour.
Abbasi and Sherman want so badly to get to the Trump of the TV show with which the film shares a title, they fudge the chronology and we spend the final act of the film with that Trump anachronistically placed in the mid-80s. It’s insufferable and leaves the film completely rudderless, going on and on and on with no end in sight—much like the last ten years have—trapping you with this egotistical maniac who won’t shut his god damned mouth.
He does plenty of reprehensible things in the final act of the film, but the film succumbs to that same phenomenon that the actual Trump so effortlessly conjures: It overwhelms you with terrible behavior to the point where nothing is shocking. A horrific assault scene is thankfully brief because the film is certainly not out to punish its audience in the way something like Irreversible is, but it’s not above giving you flashes of some really gross, sadistic, ugly, nasty stuff throughout.
The question I had going in is the same one I have coming out, “who is this for?” Surely Trump’s idol-worshipping cult won’t stand to see their savior portrayed in even the most slightly negative light. And folks like me, who have had just about enough of the man in their daily lives, will not want to spend an almost unending hour of this film with the guy from the TV screaming about migrants eating pets.
There’s likely no satisfactory answer to that question, “who is this for?” I suppose the people who will enjoy this most are the over 55 set who will marvel at what great impressions everyone is doing. In that way, this film reminds me quite a bit of Bohemian Rhapsody where the target audience seemed to be someone who would turn to the person next to them thirty seconds into every song and say, “I didn’t know Queen wrote this song, too!” Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, this flick has actual gay sex in it, so if nothing else, that’s six years of progress in action.
Header image via IMDb