Orange Juice
Sebastian STan is creepily good as a fascist in the making in the biopic no one wanted. If only life imitated art.
The Apprentice
Director: Ali Abbasi • Writer: Gabriel Sherman
Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan
Canada / Denmark / Ireland / USA • 2hrs 3mins
Opens Hong Kong Nov 28 • IIB
Grade: B
I know. If we don’t speak of it, does that mean it’s not real? If we treat the words “Donald” and “Trump” like Voldemort and just refer to him as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” will it all go away? Of course doing so means invoking the writing of raging transphobe JK Rowling. We can’t win.
So since bigot is the new black, I guess there’s no better time to dive into Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice than right now, so we can all better understand how the tacky mess that’s about to become POTUS47 transcended bad taste to simply racist and misogynist. The film that Trump has called a “defamatory, politically disgusting hatchet job” – but which he’s yet to take legal action against – is bizarrely even-handed and more insightful than it has a right to be, and it’s certainly more thoughtful than recent politibios like it, chiefly Oliver Stone’s goofy W. and Adam McKay’s schizoid Vice. Abbasi knows how to navigate the often blurry line between the personal and the political, when to cross it and when to make it more solid, exploiting humanity in Border and letting our natures loose for all to see in Holy Spider. He deals in monstrosity, and the Trump origin story is, essentially, about the making of a monster. That said, it’s not farce (which it could be), and it’s not an apology. It’s more clinical than that. And it’s certainly far more interesting in depressing hindsight.
Left, Dr Frankenstein
The Apprentice was penned by journalist Gabriel Sherman, best known for his non-fiction book The Loudest Voice in the Room, a chronicle of the life of disgraced, former Fox News president, Trump enabler and serial sexual harasser Roger Ailes. Sherman covered Trump’s 2016 presidential run, so he has a fairly strong handle on the final result. The film starts in the mid-1970s, with a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan, he of normal-sized hands) at a glitzy New York dining spot, freshly appointed boss at his father’s real estate company. Also at this restaurants is mid-century fascist lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), dining with, ahem, friends. He complains to Cohn, the renowned legal mind that often flirted with misconduct and who denied both his sexuality and HIV+ status to his dying day, about some pesky accusations of racial discrimination in one of his apartment buildings the federal government is coming for him about. Cohn handles it, and a beautiful friendship is born. Cohn taught the relatively green Trump to “always attack, never admit wrongdoing, and always claim victory” and it would appear he’s never looked back (hello, January 6). From there, The Apprentice is a fairly rote record of Trump’s rise to fame, conversion of a derelict Midtown hotel into the gaudy AF Trump Tower, eclipse of his father Fred Trump Sr (Martin Donovan) – you know, the dude with a family fortune to hand down – death of his airline pilot brother Fred Jr (Charlie Carrick) and marriage to Czech immigrant Ivana (Maria Bakalova). The ironies and contradictions come fast and furious.
This is a biopic like most others: a compelling story about a fascinating figure (hey, lots of history’s worst people are fascinating) in a middling to average film anchored by a super-strong performance – in this case two. That Jeremy Strong is bonkers committed to finding the layers, vulnerabilities and genuine menace in Cohn, and does so with incredible veracity and texture is no surprise. There’s a moment or two, brief ones, where Cohn looks as baffled and disturbed by Trump’s emerging fanaticism as we are. And then we remember who the apprentice really is. But Stan is, of course, the star, and here he’s digging into a psyche (poor bastard) rather than doing an impression. It’s an impressive performance (the lips will freak you the fuck out) and he makes the progression from “Dad, dad, pick me” try-hard to wannabe admired mogul the most natural thing in the world. We should have seen this coming in 1986. Stan and Strong get an assist from Aleks Marinkovich’s (Crimson Peak) grimy, pre-gentrification Manhattan production design – this is the New York of The Rolling Stones’ “Shattered” – and Jaro Dick’s (Hannibal, Gen V) meticulous set decoration, which together help set the time and place, and help us contextualise unbridled ambition. In the closing scenes, Trump explains to a television news magazine (remember those?) that one of the things that most upsets him is how the world doesn’t “respect America.” It’s a chilling moment for so many reasons, least of which is with Trump sent to Washington a second time, what little respect there was left just evaporated.