Joyce Glasser reviews The Apprentice (October 18, 2022) Cert. 15, 122 mins.
The timing is perfect. The Apprentice is about the “apprenticeship” of a young, ambitious but green Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) to Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the force behind Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts and a ruthless political fixer. But the release on the eve of the US election almost didn’t happen. Both Trump’s lawyers and Trump supporter, billionaire Dan Snyder, who originally backed the film, threatened the producers with all manner of cease and desist letters and law suits.
Trump’s reaction to his origins story is fitting as suing and counter suing to tie up the other party in expensive legal battles is one of the lessons Trump learns from Cohn. In the end, the producers, who maintain that “the film is a fair and balanced portrait of the former president,” won out, which suggests their assessment was correct.
The title also refers to the long running television programme that Trump co-produced and hosted for 14 seasons, with Alan Sugar taking over the Trump role in the UK with the trademark “you’re fired”. Trump himself was fired by NBC after making inappropriate remarks about Mexican immigrants in 2015.
To establish it is 1973, the film opens with vintage footage of Nixon declaring ‘I’m not a crook, I’ve earned everything I’ve got’ – no subtle foreshadowing there! Then, amidst the cesspool of humanity that was midtown Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a striking young businessman eyes the boarded up Commodore Hotel near 42nd Street where no one wanted to invest.
Within eight years, Donald Trump gave the Commodore a $100 million face lift and saw it reopened as the Hyatt Hotel – the chain’s first Manhattan hotel. He did this by obtaining a bargain basement sale price of under $10 million and coercing the cash-strapped city council into giving it a 50-year tax abatement. What followed were more property acquisitions in Manhattan, casinos and hotels in Atlantic City and a three-storey gilded penthouse on top of the 58-story skyscraper called Trump Tower. He shared the penthouse with his first wife, model-socialite-businesswoman Ivana Marie Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova), shown as another acquisition, and their children. The rest of the film dramatises, in a style as chilling and riveting as Danish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi’s thriller Holy Spider, how all this came to pass.
When the film opens Trump, a 27-year-old playboy with boyish good looks, has just handed over his Cadillac (with vanity plates) and is sitting in Le Club in Manhattan with a vapid model in his booth. His eyes wander around the expensive private club, as though searching for someone to kick start his career. Though Vice President of his father’s real estate company, Trump is a glorified rent collector whose ambitions go far beyond his conversative, overbearing father’s imagination – or limited moral boundaries.
Meeting his gaze across a crowded room is a living devil with burning eyes who is about to engage the malleable young man as his protegee in a Faustian pact with a difference. In this worldly pact, the tables can turn.
Cohn, who brags about being the man who sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths, frequently uses the word “faggot” in a derogatory sense. We remember this when, in the 1980’s Cohn asks Trump if he can spare a hotel room for his Aids-afflicted boyfriend; and in the devastating set piece when Trump gives Cohn a tribute party at Mar-a-Lago.
When Cohn calls Trump over to his table (he quickly abandons the model), he is more intimidated than made to feel welcome. Cohn recognises him as “Fred Trump’s kid,” a label Donald wants to shake off but for now, the sins of the father are frustrating the son’s plans. The government and the NAACP are suing Fred Trump’s company for racial discrimination as they won’t rent to blacks. They face ruin.
When Trump begins to elaborate, Cohn counsels, ‘don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.’ Cohn has a way of blackmailing judges into bending the law.
His immediate advice is ‘Sue them! Always sue. Make them prove discrimination.’ Trump says he’ll need a good lawyer. Cohn becomes more than that, a kind of surrogate father.
Trump’s real father, Fred, (Martin Donovan, excellent) disapproves of Cohn but eventually gives in. If he browbeats Donald, he persecutes his namesake, Fred Jr (Charlie Carrick), a commercial pilot, or what Fred calls ‘a bus driver with wings.’
At first even Donald balks at Cohn’s cutthroat (and illegal) tactics, but as the remarkable Sebastian Stan transforms into the Trump we see on television almost daily, he begins to absorb Cohn’s three rules. (i) Attack, attack, attack; (ii) admit nothing and deny everything and (iii) claim victory never admit defeat.
Abassi’s film is neither a satire – Trump is beyond satirising – nor a horror movie, but a biopic that chronicles the relationship that threatens US democracy and seems to have changed American politics forever. We see the seeds planted in a businessman carry over into politics so clearly that we can connect the dots.
The film wouldn’t work without Stans’ and Strong’s astonishing performances. They do not imitate the real life Trump and Cohn so much as embody them and reflect their essences to make them – from the Trump lumbering gate to Strong’s lean, gym-honed body and eagle eyes – come to life. They are more than just convincing.
Nor would it work without journalist Gabriel Sherman’s sharp but balanced script. Sherman and Abassi recognise Trump’s vision and shrewd risk taking, if not the means toward his ends. Sherman’s rehearsal for this script was his biography of Roger Ailes, the founder, chairman and CEO of Fox News and Fox Television Stations which he titled The Loudest Voice in the Room. Not quite two of a kind: next to Trump at the end of his apprenticeship, Ailes was a pussycat.
