OSCARS 2025: The Apprentice (2024)

I do not want to think about Donald Trump. Back when he was only a pop culture punchline, a personification of everything gaudy and vulgar about American greed, he was easy enough to ignore. As the host of a trashy reality TV show, perhaps he seemed harmless. Surely this human cartoon character wouldn't be a threat to democracy? Now, after his inexplicable rise to political power, I wake up in a state of anxiety every day. Fearful of how this vile conman, and his administration of bumbling cronies and unrepentant fascists, are going to make life worse for anyone who is not a rich white cis man today. I would rather think about anything other than the bloviating ogre in the oval office right now. Unfortunately, the Epoch of Trump is inescapable, an extremely dumb force of evil that will consume all of us as surely as the wildfires and floods will consume the globe. At least at the moment, it is still legal to speak critically of the Fuhrer and his administration. Which means we are in for many years of art trying to answer the question of how the hell we got in this ridiculous predicament. At first, it seemed like "The Apprentice," the examination of Trump's origins from the director of "Border" and "Holy Spider," would be overlooked by the Academy. The media's sudden vibe shift towards placating the fascist clowns controlling our government now has been impossible not to notice. However, I guess there's enough people who think watching a movie is actually activism that "The Apprentice" managed to sneak into the acting categories. This is why I watched a movie I really didn't want to see and I don't even get paid for this shit. 

Many years before becoming a fast food pitchman and then the President, Donald Trump is merely the son of a rich Manhattan landlord. The Department of Justice is investigating the Trumps for their racist treatment of black tenants. That's when Donald meets Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy's former chief prosecutor. Cohn sees something in the bumbling Trump and takes him under his wing. Using blackmail, Cohn successfully defends the Trumps from the DOJ. He uses similarly underhanded tactics to get the state to approve the tax breaks necessary for Trump to turn a run-down Manhattan hotel into a Hyatt. Using Cohn's rules for life – always attack, never admit wrongdoing, and claim victory no matter what – Donald becomes a mogul and tabloid fixture. He marries a Czech supermodel, further strains his relationship with his father and brother, and builds a grand ode to his own ego on 5th Avenue. He begins to ignore Cohn's advice, abusing weight loss drugs and building unsuccessful casinos in Atlantic City, pushing the two apart amid the AIDS crisis and Reaganism. 

During Trump's first successful presidential campaign, there was much bafflement about how a flagrant, compulsive liar could convince millions of voters he was a man of the people. Rather than focus on the countless societal factors at play, director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman zero in on Trump's relationship with Cohn as the origin point for his philosophy towards reality. Cohn teaches Trump that the truth is what we make it. If you lose a court case, insist you won anyway. If you did something illegal, never admit to it. No matter how guilty you are, always accuse your enemies of worse. Others will perceive you as successful, as right, through sheer force of will. Cohn teaches Trump to dress the part. He tells him to operate with undue self-confidence and break the rules to discredit those that stand in your way. And it works. Trump and Cohn dispel the DOJ investigation and talk the city into giving him the tax cuts he wants. Donald convinces Ivana to marry him and even sees her sign a ridiculous prenup she hates. He crafts such an aura of success that he eventually wins over his tyrannical father. I've seen New Age-y crackpots write essays about how Trump is an unconscious dark magician, changing the nature of reality to suit himself strictly through belief in his own power. "The Apprentice" ditches the psychomagik but comes to a similar conclusion. Cohn taught Trump the rules: Con everyone until the con absorbs the truth. And thus the Post-Truth Age, now ruled by TikTok conspiracy theories and AI generated slop, is born.

Another lesson Cohn gives Trump, as depicted here, is that all contradictions are irrelevant. One of the first things Roy does after meeting Donny is drop an anti-gay slur. This is despite Cohn being a barely closeted homosexual himself, freely partaking in the sex and drugs of New York's seventies party scene. A key moment has Roy showing Donald his collection of illegally recorded tapes of those he prosecuted. He uses criminal techniques such as these to bludgeon his enemies into submission and, all the while, claims to be a morally upright lawyer that stands for America. While the film never depicts Cohn as anything but a self-interested crook, his belief in America seems quite sincere... But what the hell does "America" mean to someone like that? How can someone with no scruples about right and wrong, on a personal or objective level, claim to stand for anything? To Cohn, "America" and all the freedom of choice it stands for is a vessel to justify any personal action or petty grudge. In a key scene, Trump receives a badge from the Reagan campaign with the slogan "Let's Make America Again." Donald admits that gesturing towards some lost, golden past is important to success, another example of how mutable these ideas and labels are to him. If Trump says America is an amazing country but also it needs to be made great again, it's true because he says it is. No matter what lie or half-assed bullshit he spouts, no matter how much he contradicts himself, it's all true because he says it is. 

Abbasi manages to do something that probably should be impossible: He humanizes Donald Trump without losing sight of what a grotesquely evil man he is. In the film's early scenes, Trump is a comical figure. He's berated – literally with boiling hot water at one point – by the tenants of his father's building. His dad never has any respect for his sons or pride in their achievements, driving Donald's brother Fred to alcoholism. An ideology about winners and losers is drilled into Trump's head. This shows a fundamental insecurity on Donald's behalf, a fear that he himself will be a "loser" someday. Cohn's philosophy, that you are a winner if you say you are, frees Donald from this weight... At the cost of whatever rotten wisp of a soul he had to begin with. 

In its last third, "The Apprentice" depicts Trump's fall into his own decadence. He receives blowjobs from models, piles his plate at the casino hotel buffet with food, pops pills, and gets plastic surgery to suck out his fat and cover up his bald spot. When his broken, unemployed brother arrives at his suite, Donald ultimately turns him away in the most condescending manner possible. After Cohn's AIDS infection becomes impossible to ignore, Trump's germaphobia – further evidence of his fear of a lack of control – pushes away his once mentor. In the most vile scene in the film, Trump violently assaults his wife after she insults the one thing that matters to him: His perception of himself as a "winner." Through it all, the future president emerges as an utterly pathetic figure, so determined to fashion an unshakable vision of being undefeated that he fights off the tears he nearly cries when his brother dies and when his wife tries to comfort him. By the end, he's so unable to connect with other people that he tries to convince his senile father to sign over his siblings' inheritance to him, in order to pay off his own debts. Because if it helps him "win," how can it be wrong? One of the taglines for "The Apprentice" was "An American horror story." The horror is not so much what this man will inflict on the country he claims to love years down the line. Instead, the horror is in watching a person – once a crying baby, like all of us, like Don Jr. is in one scene – turn himself into an inhuman monster. 

You can certainly debate the merits of humanizing a man currently making so many people's lives miserable right now. Perhaps “The Apprentice's” somewhat shapeless last third is because the film is so determined not to leave Trump sympathetic. The same can be said of the two extraordinary performances at its center. Sebastian Stan, made an almost eerie approximation of Trump's appearance through some well done make-up, always insures that there's a layer of sweaty desperation and uncouth ego in everything Trump does. He clearly devoted himself to mimicking the President's bizarre physical tics and vocal inflections. If acting is a game of convincing the audience you are another person, you certainly don't see much of Stan in his depiction of Trump here. Jeremy Strong, meanwhile, makes Cohn a perpetually glaring figure, dead-eyed and tanned golden brown, spitting every vile thing he says with utmost conviction. They are extraordinary physical transformation. Kasper Tuxen's cinematography grants the film a gritty visual sense, often emphasizing the grimy feeling of inauthenticity that clings to everything Trump surrounds himself with, going a long way to further sell its performances.

It's been nearly ten years since Trump wormed his presence into seemingly every corner of American life, a curse I can't see ourselves being free of any time soon. In that time, we've already had plenty of polemics about how the hell any of this has been possible. “The Apprentice” comes the closest to answering how an openly corrupt, proudly vulgar man could become such a prominent political figure. Abbasi is Iranian-Danish, seeming to prove the Paul Verhoeven Rule again, that filmmakers from outside America are better at perceiving its character than those born and raised in this country. With two powerful performance behind it, the film manages to get at some nuggets of truth about how a person like that comes into being, an attempt to make some sort of sense out this chaotic madness that holds we innocent bystanders in its grip. [8/10]