It must be truly humiliating for contestants on the US version of The Apprentice to be fired. Yet equally it must be a relief too that they were never taken on as the apprentice by a business man who couldnt’ run a casino without it going bust and with the face of a toby jug modelled by the inmate of a high security mental institution. So though Donald Trump is now possibly the world’s best known sex pest it is his origin story which the explores in director Ali Abbasi’s new film. ‘The Apprentice’ where it is Trump who plays the title role.
Set in 1970’s Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) works for his father as a sort of rent collector but with bigger dreams for himself than getting abused by his father’s tenants. Keen to be a big fish he goes to the exclusive New York clubs seen as a nest of vipers where the rich and powerful hang out almost as though he is trying to absorb by osmosis these big beasts ability. And it’s here that he wangles his way into the company of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) an infamous or more rightly monstrous lawyer who is unafraid of stopping at anything that will win him a case. He is the master of all he surveys and there’s a shot of him in the club perfectly still and staring right ahead into camera – it’s the Kubrick stare and here it’s a stare that says ‘I will eat you’. Trump is drawn to his magnetism and persuades him to take on a case which he duly wins using underhand tactics. Yet rather than take a fee he offers Trump an almost Faustian pact and Trump is hooked in.
Written by Gabriel Sherman this is an utterly absorbing rise to power story and at the same time it’s a study in how the tables are turned when the pupil turns master. Both are monsters and the seeds for Trump’s modern day deals are set by three rules from Cohn. 1 Attack, Attack, Attack! 2. Admit nothing, deny everything 3. Never admit defeat and always claim victory. Trump plays them out to unnerving and nauseating effect as he rises ever further to power and at his side is his first wife the late Ivana (Maria Bakalova). But right for the start the film opens with a disclaimer about the film being a fictionalization which undermines what you see perhaps most notably when Trump rapes Ivana, an uncomfortable scene by any means and one that probably should have been cut when Ivana herself retracted the claim and Trump unsurprisingly denied it.
But at the heart of this are two enthralling performances in a kind of father-son relationship. Whist Stan might not look like Trump he certainly channels the essence of him perfectly. All the vanity is there – one moment claiming to others that his wife thinks he looks like Robert Redford, the next having liposuction and follicle implants. Strong is even better, half lizard, half chicken with his bobbing head and all odious. Throwing out quotable lines his scenes are never less than fascinating and ups the films ante whenever he is on screen. And his fall from power due to terminal illness before being humiliated, rejected and ignored by Trump is both delicious and morally dubious in trying to elicit sympathy for him.
The first half is the stronger as we watch Trump , already thin on morality and ethics, totally subsumed by Cohn’s corrupting influence. The second half finds Trump as we know him today: amoral, unapologetic, delusional and often out of his depth, cheap and corrupt with little explanation just that this is the way he is. And the script is littered with plenty of knowing lines throughout that are almost winks to camera. The Apprentice is unlikely to be the last film we have about Trump but it’s the performances that really make the film.
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Here’s The Apprentice trailer…..
