A few years ago, I remember seeing an interview in which Oliver Stone claimed he could never make a movie about Donald Trump. This was somewhat surprising since, with apologies to John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln,” Stone’s 1995 “Nixon” is arguably the greatest filmed portrait of an American president, finding a Shakespearean grandeur in this thin-skinned, petty tyrant sowing the seeds of his own downfall. It’s a sublime work of sympathetic imagination about a person whose politics the filmmaker clearly despised. Yet Stone said that Trump was too simple a character to be the subject of a good film, lacking the introspection or self-awareness to engage an audience’s empathy. Bad drama, basically.
I thought about that a lot while watching “The Apprentice.” Director Ali Abbasi’s chronicle of the 45th president’s early years in New York City is a polished and occasionally effective film that sinks into the gaping hollowness at its core. The circumstances around Trump’s singular life and accomplishments are indeed fascinating, but the man himself is quite dull — a base, unreflective creature of pure petulance and needy egomania. Perhaps realizing the limitations of their subject, Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman have framed “The Apprentice” as a poisoned “Pygmalion” riff, with an aspiring young slumlord from Queens becoming the toast of Manhattan under the toxic tutelage of sleazy power player Roy Cohn, who in the boy saw a soul even more rancid than his own.
Abbasi is a filmmaker who tends toward the brutish. His 2022 serial killer thriller “Holy Spider” started with a scene in which a sex worker is assaulted while we see a plane slamming into the World Trade Center on a TV in the other room. He brings a similar, not-exactly-velvet-gloved finesse to these proceedings, like a howler of a scene in which a children’s choir sings “America the Beautiful” over graphic footage of Trump’s liposuction and scalp reduction surgeries. After months of controversy and PR dust-ups since the film premiered at this past summer’s Cannes Film Festival, “The Apprentice” is finally arriving in local theaters thanks to upstart Briarcliff Entertainment, which picked it up after Hollywood establishment distributors passed.
As one might imagine, a certain Florida man is displeased, sending cease and desist letters while threatening lawsuits that have yet to be filed. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Deadline: “This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store. It belongs in a dumpster fire.” (They should put that on the poster.)
You’d think someone as vain as Trump would be flattered to be portrayed by Sebastian Stan, a blandly handsome actor best known as Captain America’s sidekick in the Marvel movies. Even wearing the trademark wavy coiffure, he’s way too pretty for the part. I’ve always thought Stan looks like he should be playing a doctor on a nighttime soap, but he does a creditable imitation of the verbal tics and bizarre hand gestures we know all too well. Presumably in the interest of drama, the movie oversells the young Trump’s initial naivete, presenting him as a doe-eyed babe in the woods introduced to a wild new world of bribery and corruption by Cohn’s rude operator in a Rolls-Royce.
A closeted gay man who spent his career persecuting other gay people, Cohn died from AIDS-related complications in 1986. He’s a corker of a character who has historically been catnip for awards bodies. (Nathan Lane won a Tony for playing him on Broadway in “Angels in America” while Al Pacino scored an Emmy for Mike Nichols’ HBO adaptation of the play. James Woods received an Emmy nomination for the 1992 cable movie “Citizen Cohn” and probably never once considered he was playing the bad guy.) It’s a plum part for “Succession” star Jeremy Strong, who in “The Apprentice” plays Cohn as a magnetically loathsome figure, the toxic Henry Higgins to Trump’s doofus Eliza Doolittle.
Strong is such a powerful actor, he blows Stan and everyone else in “The Apprentice” off the screen. His dead-eyed gaze and bobbing head mimic the famous historical footage of Cohn the Commie-hunter, and the actor gets some undeniable laughs out of the brusqueness with which he berates everyone in his vicinity. But additionally, there’s something alluring about him, and almost sad in the tenderness with which he treats his young protégé. He looks at him with a longing that’s not just sexual — though that’s certainly part of it — but oddly wistful and delicate as well. When Trump inevitably betrays his mentor the way he inevitably betrays everyone in his inner circle, Strong does what I would have thought impossible. He made me feel sorry for Roy Cohn.
One of the bright spots in this grim, oppressive movie is Maria Bakalova as Ivana Zelníčková, who initially rebuffs the advances of her future husband with a comic aplomb that belongs in a much funnier take on this tale. I suppose one could joke that her Oscar-nominated experience with Rudy Giuliani in the “Borat” sequel makes Bakalova an expert in being mauled on camera by MAGA cretins, but the film’s later scenes of domestic abuse are still extremely difficult to watch. Especially since you know going in that this is all going to end with her being buried on a golf course.
And there’s the rub, isn’t it? “The Apprentice” does a pretty good job of telling us stuff you probably already knew. One can admire certain aspects of Abbasi’s film while wondering who exactly it’s supposed to be for. Trump’s supporters aren’t going to want to see him portrayed in this way, while the rest of us have grown so incredibly sick and tired of this man who has occupied such an outsized space in our daily lives for nearly a decade, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to go out and see a movie about him. I hate having to hear his voice every day, and deeply resent being forced to think about Donald Trump more often than I get the chance to think about certain friends and family members. My Trump derangement syndrome could more aptly be described as fatigue. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I just want him to be quiet and go away. Nine seasons is long enough for any show, especially this one.
“The Apprentice” is now in theaters.