The Apprentice: A Cartoonish Portrayal of Donald Trump’s Early Years
Ali Abbasi’s film, The Apprentice, presents a genially ironic and lenient TV movie-style treatment of Donald Trump’s early adventures in 70s landlordism, property, and tabloid celebrity. The film focuses on Trump’s apprentice relationship with dark legal sorcerer and Nixon intimate Roy Cohn, who taught him to lie to others and himself and never admit defeat.
A nostalgic look at the picturesque sleaze of 1970s New York City
The film’s portrayal of young Donald Trump is almost sentimental, a cartoon Xeroxed from many other satirical Trump takes and knowing prophetic echoes of his political future. The ambience is borrowed from Scorsese and Coppola, with Donald’s deadbeat elder brother Fred even getting a “Fredo” scene where he gets embarrassingly, tearfully drunk at a big event, like the loser he is.
Sebastian Stan’s moderate hair-and-makeup performance as the young Donald Trump
Jeremy Strong is much more interesting and effectively threatening as Cohn, with his strange physical stillness and lizardly stare, catching the young Trump’s flinching glance in an elite members club and staring at him in the men’s room. The voltage goes up when Strong is onscreen, especially when he admits Donald to his hideous townhouse party for all the other disreputable movers and shakers: “If you’re indicted, you’re invited!”
A glimpse into Roy Cohn’s infamous townhouse party
The Cohn angle and rather wasted asset of Strong’s casting are what makes this story original, but so much of the time he’s absent, and we just get the story of Donald’s rise to the top with first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) at his side, doing the mega-marble interior decor in Trump Tower.
Ivana Trump, the first wife of Donald Trump
The other great influence in Donald’s life, his glowering and finally envious dad Fred (Martin Donovan), is shrewdly represented. However, the film’s treatment of a rape scene, which had many expecting a moment like the one in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain, a secret chapter of violence and shame and power, is not like that, or not exactly. In the film, Donald rapes Ivana, who had been taunting him about his hair and weight – and this moment is every bit as hateful and misogynistic and shocking as you would expect.
A younger Donald Trump, full of ambition and arrogance
But then the film returns to its usual breezy pastiche-montage of amoral narcissism and conceit. So often, Donald comes across as nothing much more than a rascally and tiresome chump. There is something very pathetic about Roy’s final illness and his humiliation at the hands of the ungrateful Donald, but again the film comes close to a mood of glum yet knowing resignation in the face of this ugly and banal callousness.
Roy Cohn, the dark legal sorcerer and Nixon intimate
In sketching out his pre-White-House career, The Apprentice worryingly moves us back to the old Donald, the joke Donald who had a cameo in Home Alone 2 and of course his own hit TV show, the joke that is now beyond unfunny.
