THE APPRENTICE (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Apprentice, Briarcliff Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 10, 2024

The Apprentice arrives at least eight years too late, perhaps, for it to be the sort of exposé that screenwriter Gabriel Sherman and director Ali Abbasi might want it to be. We have lived with Donald Trump as a famous business mogul, reality TV star, and politician for about four decades now. He is a part of history at this point, deserving of some inspection and demanding of a depiction that, as so many of his supporters believe of the man's way of speaking, tells it like it is.

Here, then, is the story of an ambitious but mostly incapable man, living in the shadow of his businessman father and resenting it. In his 30s, Donald wants nothing more than to be his own man with his own deals, reputation, and wealth, and when we first meet him at an exclusive New York City club, that seems to be the full extent of his personality, except that his insecurity about not having any of those things is visible. One might feel sorry for him in these early moments, as his date at the club becomes increasingly bored with his self-congratulatory words, the man desperately tries to impress his father at dinner, and his grand ambitions are stuck while he collects late rent from tenants at his old man's various apartment buildings.

Donald is played in the film by Sebastian Stan, who does much more than simply imitate the Trump we know now. At the start, the character is different, after all, offering bluster but appearing not to believe it himself and craving attention, albeit because his life and career amount to little more than ambitions at the moment. One can hear flashes of the accent and some of the more noticeable verbal tics in Stan's early-stage Donald, and as the course of his personal and professional lives lead him toward superficial success and accomplishment, Stan's portrayal gradually becomes more like the caricature the real man invented for himself.

There's a clear divide in Sherman's narrative, which splits its depiction of Donald between his ambitions of the 1970s and the fulfillment of them during the 1980s. The first half focuses its attention on Donald's relationship with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a notorious attorney whose claims to fame include getting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed on espionage charges, helping Joseph McCarthy ramp up the Red Scare, and being repeatedly indicted on various criminal charges of his own—but never, as a source of some pride, convicted.

Donald spots Roy, who eyes him, at that club, and after sitting and talking with the man and his questionable associates, the upstart businessman seeks out Roy's legal expertise on a discrimination case being brought against the Trump organization by the federal government. Roy takes it but doesn't seek any compensation, because he sees a lot of potential in Donald's future—especially if the lawyer helps to shape it.

He does shape it—in ways that become obvious as soon as Roy goes through his three rules for doing business. Always attack. Admit nothing, and deny everything. Claim victory in any situation, and never admit defeat. In that advice, we hear the last decade or so of Trump's political career, with the ramifications of that last rule still haunting the previous presidential election and looming like an omen of doom over the forthcoming one. The timing of Abbasi's film may be late in general, but that doesn't stop it from still being frighteningly relevant.

That's partly why this material, which tells us nothing new about Trump or his dubious business acumen or his personal shortcomings and flaws or accusations of sexual misconduct and crime that have been leveled against him, means something. Trump is still with us for the foreseeable future. Warnings about him have come, gone, been repeated, and been forgotten, excused, or ignored by good number of people. This film likely won't change minds, but as a dramatized account of reality, it condenses the man's story into a psychologically cohesive one that makes too much sense to be dismissed as a mere polemic against him.

Indeed, it's too compelling a story to simply label it as a piece of political opportunism or propaganda. The story is almost a tragedy for both of its key players. The two men form a close bond that is, initially, damaging to whatever good qualities a young Donald might have honed as a human being and that, ultimately, condemns Roy to nothing more than a footnote in the grand political narrative he wanted to revolve around him. Tragedy, of course, doesn't automatically imply or require sympathy with the figure or figures at the center of it, except in that broad sentiment that any of us could fall into these traps of the right—or wrong—situation and human frailty.

In that way, the story is almost classically structured. Donald rises with Roy's counsel, achieving much with a lot of backroom dealings and marrying Ivana (Maria Bakalova), the woman he loves—until he doesn't. The man grows too big for himself, his family (especially Martin Dovan's Trump patriarch, whose opinion Donald stops caring about, and Charlie Carrick's Freddy, the alcoholic older brother who starts to become a burden to Donald), his previous aspirations, and, of course, the man who led him to become so successful and significant in the first place. Roy basically teaches Donald to live by ego, without realizing he's too fine a teacher with a student who is, given his circumstances and outlook, too prone to the lessons.

This is technically fiction, as an opening disclaimer reminds us, but The Apprentice clearly contains some specific truths about the man at its center and more general ones about human behavior. It may be yet another warning about this guy, to be forgotten or ignored like the rest, but it's also a fine film in its own right.

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