“The Apprentice” opens up with a very famous quote from Richard Nixon – “I am not a crook,” Nixon gravels over the film’s opening moments, something he said deep into the Watergate investigation that would ultimately lead to his impeachment. “I earned everything I’ve got.”
Starting a movie about Donald Trump (played here by Sebastian Stan) – a former president in the middle of his own series of unfortunate investigations – with a quote from Richard Nixon isn’t exactly subtle. But “The Apprentice,” written by Gabriel Sherman and directed by Ali Abbasi, doesn’t deal in subtlety. Much like its subject.
The film follows Trump’s real estate career through the 70s and 80s, paying particularly close attention to his relationship with and tutelage under Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the New York City prosecutor who rose to prominence for his work with Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. “The Apprentice” is well made, with a cinematic style that evolves from paranoid 70s to the flash of the 80s, and features a finely-tuned performance from Stan at its center. But once Trump transforms into the man we know him to be today, there’s not much that’s interesting lurking underneath the surface. We’re left watching one horrible man mold another into his image, and the not-so-subtle foreshadowing to Trump’s further rise to political prominence is nothing more than a depressing easter egg hunt.
Cohn first spots Trump from across the room at a private club. The scene plays out like a horror movie, both men squared in the middle of the frame as the camera switches back and forth between them. Trump awkwardly tries to avoid Cohn’s stare. Cohn looks like the devil incarnate.
From there, Cohn takes Trump under his wing. The film never explicitly says why or what Cohn sees in Trump, but an undercurrent of power and sex runs beneath their relationship. During an early dinner meeting, Cohn pressures the usually sober Trump to drink, showering him with compliments all the while – “You’re gorgeous,” he says. “You’re a real thoroughbred.” Throughout his life, Cohn has sex with men, and in “The Apprentice,” there’s really no difference in how he approaches his sexual relationships and his professional ones.
In these early scenes, Stan smartly stays away from evoking the Trump persona that has become so prominent over the past few decades. He doesn’t descend into parody – a difficult task with this particular character, considering how ripe his mannerisms are for impression and how many famous impressions there are. Stan starts off relatively normal, all of Trump’s gestures and expressions toned down. There may be a subtle pursing of the lips, or maybe a tendency to repeat himself, but nothing is overplayed. Interestingly enough, this early Trump is also void of charisma. “I love getting to know people,” he says robotically to Cohn during that first meeting. “It’s very important for my business.” Later, when Cohn makes an off-handed comment that Trump seems like he has a lot sex, it seems laughably absurd.
The trick of the performance, then, is watching Trump learn to be Trump. Cohn is the key ingredient there. In one scene, Trump is on the phone in a car talking to a reporter about his new hotel, Cohn sitting to his right. He starts off telling the reporter that the building will be the best in the city. Cohn pushes him to exaggerate – the building evolves from the best in the city, to the nation, to the world, evoking Trump’s penchant for exaggeration that we all know so well.
But that evolution only lasts for about the first half of the film before Trump comes fully into his own. Here, Stan sort of has to necessarily lean into parody. It’s not a bad parody – quite good, in fact – but it’s far less interesting than everything that became before. If the crux of the movie in the first hour is Cohn and Trump’s relationship, that dies out by the time the second hour rolls around. Instead, we watch Trump discard his family, discard his wife, and discard Cohn. Cohn was HIV-positive toward the end of his life (something he would deny) and eventually died from complications due to AIDS. At the end of the film, Strong manages to make Cohn as sympathetic as someone like him could be. Trump invites him to Florida to celebrate his birthday, but that “celebration” ends up being more of a public embarrassment than anything else. He gives Cohn diamond cufflinks. Cohn shows them off to Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova), who sadly informs him that they’re just zirconia.
So, Trump is a monster. Is that all? If the story “The Apprentice” wants to tell is “horrible man creates a monster who eventually out-monsters him,” it succeeds. But beyond greed, “The Apprentice” doesn’t seem interested in getting at the why. With Cohn mostly out of the picture, the second half of the film devolves into constant foreshadowing of the Trump presidency. It’s just enough to make you go, “Yes, and?” But “The Apprentice” doesn’t really have an answer.
