"Donald who?" The obvious joke comes early in The Apprentice, a film that dares to be about the rise to fame of Donald Trump. Naturally, the result is soap opera, with a hint of The Omen. But black comedy also pervades. Even the title is a gag. It comes lifted from the TV show that launched a run for president -- but the movie is set decades earlier.
We open in 1973, with Trump (Sebastian Stan) mere junior partner in his own origin story. The power in the couple is Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), serpentine lawyer to the Mob and Joseph McCarthy. By this telling, he is also the man who made the man, with an infamous grab-bag of dirty tricks.
A disclaimer tells us some events have been "fictionalized for dramatic purposes". The most contentious scene will be one in which the later Trump is shown raping his then wife, Ivana. (She made the allegation in 1990, but later recanted.) The sequence is uncertainly handled. The film is out of its depth. The Trump camp threatened a lawsuit in May. While it was not pursued, it may have made it harder for the film to secure US distribution. (An American release finally arrived through independent Briarcliff Entertainment.)
It also functions as meta pre-publicity for a story set in motion by legal gamesmanship. We find family patriarch Fred Trump being sued by the Department of Justice over an alleged refusal to let New York apartments to Black tenants. His son begs Cohn to help. (For some viewers, this might pass for a meet cute.) Cohn's countersuit loses, but confuses the picture. From here, the pair are mutually glommed.
For the wannabe mogul, the goal is to dot Manhattan with gilded skyscrapers. Director Ali Abbasi gives us his first broad wink as Trump pitches his real estate plans as inseparable from the city's best interests. Only he can bring back past glories. And so on.
For subject and movie alike, history is a means to an end. Delivered with a palpable ta-da, the thesis of writer Gabriel Sherman is that Cohn's brutal playbook was handed down whole to Trump. Every defeat, for instance, must be claimed as a victory. (Sherman will have been delighted to see the older man's influence seemingly play on after the movie wrapped. Here, Cohn still gleams with pride at his and McCarthy's fevered anticommunism. Half a century later, Trump has conjured "Comrade Kamala".)
The film duly restores Cohn's credit as it ticks through the Trump ascent. Officials are corrupted, contractors stiffed, a pre-nup handed to Czech model Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova). Abbasi's last movie was Holy Spider, a drama of true crime in Iran. The title could work here too. Eerily sure of his cause, Strong never blinks. Stan fusses with his hair and pouts. The likenesses are among the movie's pleasures. So too the snapshot of the queasy decadence that swirled around Cohn, with guest spots for Rupert Murdoch and Andy Warhol. (Trump asks him what he does.)
The Apprentice is sharpest when tracing Maga back to Cohn in all his pungent strangeness. Much else is fuzzy at the edges. We are often told what Trump learnt from Cohn. Less clear is what master saw in pupil. Sherman leaves unmentioned both men's histories as boy princes of wealthy New York families, if never quite insiders: Trump the thwarted social climber, Cohn gnawed by self-loathing at his sexuality.
And the film struggles with trying to bend the reality of the material into a Hollywood arc. To begin with, the young Trump is almost sweetly naive, the better to accent later cruelties. By then we're also asked to pity Cohn. You may find both plot points hard to buy. In the life of Trump, fans and foes agree that all that has ever really changed are the supporting characters. Once there was Roy and Ivana. Now there is America.
Meanwhile, for all the mood of exposé, the inner life of the subject mostly remains as elusive as Bigfoot. Donald who?
