I LOVE movies. But the summer, post pandemic and capped off by the writers’ strike, was a dud. This fall seemed on its way to falling flat– until today when I saw the best film of the year so far: THE APPRENTICE –a title that ironically references the TV show hosted by ex-president Donald Trump. The film charts the rise of young Trump, molded by unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn who took him into his den and gave him a diabolical three-point blueprint for success: 1) ATTACK. 2) DENY. 3) CLAIM VICTORY Never admit defeat. Anyone would be hard pressed to refute that this has been a winning formula for Donald Trump. When the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it received an 8-minute standing ovation. Trump threatened to sue.
No matter what your political bent, the movie is a dynamite character study and amalgamation of Trump lore and 80’s excess. The narrative is intensely focused, the direction by Ali Abbasi (“The Last of Us”) fleet and fierce with a touch of gloom, the performances gripping. Jeremy “Succession” Strong is bound to be nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of the vicious Roy Cohn, a dead-eyed and closeted gay man whose interest is aroused, perhaps homo-erotically, by the tall, golden-haired young Trump, scrappy and hungry for what Cohn had: power and money. Sebastian Stan’s Donald Trump is nothing short of brilliant. Stan’s physical incarnation of the up-and-comer is masterful– not just the swoop of hair and slight stoop of his shoulders, but the broad, unanimated face, the soft Queens-inflected accent, and the blunt, humorless delivery. That delivery grows less tentative and ever more bombastic as Trump slowly comes into focus to become the wheeler dealer who built that Tower in Manhattan, his first big mark on the world.
The script which we are told is based on real characters but takes dramatic liberties was written by Vanity Fair journalist, best- selling author and Newton’s own Gabriel Sherman (“Independence Day”) and fleshes out some of the forces which shaped the man. His real-estate developer father Fred (played by Martin Donovan with a whiff of fear of the son who would surpass him) had a hand in hardening Donald to the world and his own feelings. He sent him off off to military school, then pitted him against his doomed older brother and airline pilot Freddie, played by a deeply affecting Charlie Carrick; Freddie would eventually die an alcoholic.
Trump’s triumph over his father, his ambivalence about his brother, and his disdain for alcohol make sense, but don’t quite make Trump sympathetic. The script goes straight for the jugular. Drugs, blackmail, and liposuction are all part of this foul brew. Trump’s courting of and marriage to the go-getter Ivana (Cohn ironically catches the bouquet at their wedding!) played by Oscar-nominated Maria Bakalova, culminates in a graphic, controversial scene which Ivana herself initially described as rape, then later qualified. The film pulls no such punches.
The climax of the movie takes place at Mar-a-Lago lit like a haunted castle as the now enfeebled Cohn confronts the monster he created but never saw coming. It’s a scene almost operatic in scope, funereal in tone, a take on that most gothic of gothic fairytales just in time for Halloween, except this is no fairytale– and the ending is right around the corner.
THE APPRENTICE opening today, October 11.
