The Apprentice is a better movie than I expected, with memorable performances by Sebastian Stan as a much younger Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong as notoriously corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn, the mentor who did so much make Trump the shameless, smirking, bloviating, bizarrely successful presidential candidate we know today.
But I had to wonder who the audience was supposed to be for this film. Trump supporters will never see it, having been long since tipped off to stay away: “Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung blasted The Apprentice as ‘pure fiction’ and ‘election interference by Hollywood elites right before November.’”
The various campaign statements that the film constitutes “pure malicious defamation” were accompanied by a cease-and-desist letter to its producers before it ever premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. That meant most top Hollywood distribution companies passed on it, and its release was uncertain until Tom Ortenberg of Briarcliff Entertainment acquired it for theatrical release with a grandiose flourish:
The fact that nobody else was willing to distribute The Apprentice created a moral imperative for me to step up and do it. . . . If not me, then who? Unfortunately, the major studios collectively ran away from The Apprentice like their hair was on fire for fear of reprisal.
And even the most likely audience for the film, the anti-Trump segment of the population, perhaps drawn to this highly unflattering portrayal, might not be able to bear a solid block of time spent watching the bane of their existences rise to personal wealth, power, and influence in 1980s New York City. Trump is almost too effectively evoked by Stan in every petulant pout and smarmy lying boast and round-shouldered shamble.
On top of that, most of this biographical material about Trump’s rise to fame, or infamy, which was comprehensively fact-checked by journalist screenwriter Gabriel Sherman and director Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider), is already well known by people who despise Trump. And as the final capper, films dealing with politics are generally unpopular in the United States. Add up all those points and you can predict a box-office bomb, which is indeed what’s being reported about the film’s opening weekend.
Roy Cohn was of great help to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s.
So you’ll have to hurry if you really want to see this film in theaters before it gets unceremoniously pulled out of circulation. And it has its fascinations. Strong’s performance as the reptilian Cohn, who seemed to have left any salvageable humanity behind him long before he’s shown fixing his alligator-like stare on young Trump across a crowded room, is the most compelling element, by design. As a brief reminder, Cohn is the vicious infighting prosecutor who was an adviser and close personal friend of Richard Nixon’s, with a client list that included prominent Mafia bosses. He was of great help to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s. In 1951, Cohn dedicated himself to making sure Julius and Ethel Rosenberg both got the death penalty after they were convicted of traitorous espionage in supplying state secrets to the USSR.
Remaining an anti-communist fanatic to the end of his days, Cohn professed a disturbing personal philosophy that represented his extraordinarily brutal and often illegal methods of practicing law as a patriotic duty to the America he claimed to love. Indicted multiple times but never convicted, Cohn bribed, blackmailed, and witness-tampered his way to the top of his profession and New York high society. He sustained his power by bugging all the rooms in his house, including his home office, so that he had the tape-recorded goods on the legions of high-powered people who consulted him professionally and attended his parties. The more orgiastic, drug-fueled revelry generally took place at after-parties at Studio 54, which was run by clients of Cohn’s, but Abbasi’s budget couldn’t accommodate the re-creation of the famous disco, so he represented a hot-stuff house party instead.
Amazingly, it seems that Cohn was so feared that nobody he was blackmailing ever turned the tables on him, though he was doing very little to hide his sexual relationships with men at a time when that was a career-ending scandal for many. He always denied being gay, and he was stridently homophobic, claiming to be far too strong and authoritative a person to be a gay man
In the movie, when Cohn first levels that flat stare at young Trump in an expensive restaurant where Trump has just been ditched by his date, it’s presumably an expression of predatory sexual interest in a tall blond naif. Trump is portrayed as what he scorns most — a “loser,” awkward, badly dressed, unknown in high-flying Manhattan circles and desperately worshipful of those who are at home in its gleaming environs. He’s a gauche outsider from Queens employed by his rich, nasty slumlord father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), having to make the rounds collecting the rent himself and manifestly uncertain how to succeed on his own.
He’s already watched his older brother, Fred Jr (Charlie Carrick), shot down by their father as a “bus driver with wings” for having bailed out on the family business to become a commercial pilot. And Fred Jr is soon succumbing to the alcoholic despair that will kill him at age forty-two. Now it’s Donald’s turn to prove himself, and his first opportunity involves somehow getting his father off the hook for charges leveled by the US Justice Department accusing him of discrimination against prospective black tenants. Why not request the services of his powerful new friend Roy Cohn?
Cohn, always savvy, notes that the case against Trump’s father has overwhelming evidence, including rental applications marked with a “c” for “colored,” indicating the reason for turning the applicants down. Nevertheless, Cohn manages to get the case settled out of court for a very moderate amount of money. It’s all part of the process of showing young Donald the ropes in terms of how to acquire wealth and power. The rules are:
- Attack, attack, attack.
- Deny every accusation.
- Always claim victory.
And Trump learns these rules by heart so that, in the end, he recites them as his own invention, only he adds garrulous embellishments that make them sound much less impressively lethal. But that tendency will be familiar to anyone who’s ever heard one of Trump’s speeches full of rambling braggadocio.
The film breaks down into two sections: the 1970s, when Trump is Cohn’s eager but comparatively hapless acolyte, and the 1980s, when Trump’s head swells over his Cohn-abetted real estate successes and, as a crass king of New York society, he increasingly distances himself from his mentor. Unable to bear giving anyone else credit, he rewrites history so that, by the end of the film, he can declare to his biographer Tony Schwartz (Eoin Duffy), who pens The Art of the Deal, that he was born with a killer instinct, an indication of genetic superiority that just naturally brought him to the top.
Trump’s relationship with Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) reflects the same grotesquely insecure and self-obsessed arc. When he meets her, she’s a Czech model making her own way in NYC and engaged to someone else, and he’s boyishly infatuated and courts her assiduously. But once they’re married, her career ambitions as the interior designer of his Commodore Hotel and Trump Tower begin to grate on him. Soon he’s downplaying her contributions, resenting the public attention she’s getting, and declaring to Cohn that he looks at her and “feels nothing” because she’s “more like a business partner” than a wife. Make that “business rival.”
The most controversial scene in the film, as far as whether it actually happened, is probably the depiction of Trump’s violent rape of Ivana. But even that is based on Ivana’s own statement in her divorce deposition, a charge she subsequently walked back by adding, “As a woman I felt violated. . . . I referred to this as a rape, but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
Trump is almost too effectively evoked by Stan in every petulant pout and smarmy lying boast and round-shouldered shamble.
The even bigger betrayal, in terms of the film’s structure of emotional impact, is Trump’s rejection of Cohn when he’s dying of AIDS. Increasingly inclined to ignore Cohn’s advice, especially the smarter pieces about not expanding too fast and not incurring massive debt — the developments that nearly brought Trump down before he became a TV star with the show The Apprentice — Trump is hardly seeing Cohn by the end of the lawyer’s life, and he’s routinely rejecting Cohn’s calls.
As screenwriter Sherman puts it, the strangest events in the movie are the most solidly factual ones. That includes the supposedly diamond-encrusted, Tiffany-made but “Trump”-engraved cuff links that Trump gives Cohn at a birthday party he hosts for the dying man that are revealed to be cheap knockoffs.
In the film, Strong’s Cohn leaves the party weeping, his wheelchair rolling out with painful slowness while the guests seated around the long table watch uneasily. Whether that actually happened isn’t clear in all those “true or false” pieces that follow such films as The Apprentice. But it’s the closest the film comes to evoking sympathy for the devil that was Cohn.
However, it seems that Trump really did have the rooms Cohn stayed in steam-cleaned after his death in his persistent germophobic ignorance and paranoia about how AIDS is transmitted.
It’s interesting that, in the view of the director, which is echoed frequently in reviews, the film is embracing a “radically humanist angle” on Donald Trump by showing his youthful insecurities and sometimes slightly reluctant way of adopting Cohn’s more malevolent positions and practices. But the “humanizing” so often referred to in discussions of this film seems to suggest Trump is being made to look like a better person than he was or is. Who seriously doubts Trump’s humanity, when we have examples of ghastly human behavior on all sides of us?
In short, The Apprentice makes it plain, with lurid details, that Donald Trump was and is a vile person. So much so that it’s a toss-up whether he was ultimately as bad as or worse than Roy Cohn, the man who did his all to make the United States a rottener place to be and capped it by helping to foist Trump upon the American public in a lasting way that seems as incurable as herpes.
