
In the 1980s, Donald Trump joked about running for President. At the time, a slogan for Ronald Reagan’s presidency was “Make America Great Again.” Trump, disinterested in politics at the time, scoffed at how politicians are so locked into a world with limited power that he could purchase himself. The Apprentice focuses on Trump’s formative business years of the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting the key moments that led to him becoming the most culturally corrupting President since Reagan. While there are a handful of the winks above in the staging, little is explored beyond the cliffnotes of this era, finding scenes better built for performances than dissecting the components that fed Trump’s ego.
The critical relationship focused on for this film is how an uncertain Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) allied with lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). While Trump came from a wealthy family, Cohn came from a life of defending the most rotten of elites, ranging from Joseph McCarthy to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. Of course, Trump was more interested in Cohn’s abilities as a fixer. The prosecutor would become a useful tool in bending New York City to make his dreams come true, from discriminating against black tenants to funding his dream of Trump Tower with ludicrous tax incentives. What Trump did take away from Cohn’s lessons that fed into his career was to always be attacking and never apologizing.
For centering on a snapshot of Trump’s ascent, this narrative seems to cover the bullet points more than it does exploring the deeper motivations. Stan’s performance of Trump is sufficient in how he tries not to portray a caricature (sounding more like Bill Burr), but he’s working with material that doesn’t give him much. There is humility and bitterness in this portrayal but scattered across a handful of notable moments that never find a firm framing for the provocative figure. The more focus on Trump’s base desires for power and fatherly acceptance removes some of the agency from Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova), making her feel more like a victim of greed’s fallout. That fallout, by the way, is being raped and ridiculed for her appearance by the man she married and would ultimately divorce. Donald’s father, Fred (Martin Donovan), is also showcased as little more than a shrewd businessman who didn’t love his kids enough, downplaying his racist history that coated Trump’s similar racist approach that only bubbles up for a handful of scenes.
Director Ali Abbasi gets a bit lost in the shuffle of this era in Donald’s life. Plenty of archival footage zooms across the screen as fast as the film zips to the next key moment in Trump’s New York rise-to-power story. There’s drama aimed for in these crucial moments, but also a desire to connect the past to present, more through distant echoes than any greater thematic purpose. The reduction of Trump being a greedy guy manipulated by other greedy people places far too much pity on a rich brat who never got daddy’s love and perpetuates a cycle of monstrous legal deceptions. This oversimplification makes scenes of Trump’s flaccid affairs and body issues seem less like developing parts of his character and more like winking nods to the origins of Trump’s future rapes, obesity issues, and orange-coated skin.
So much hubris becomes wrapped around figures like Cohn that it’s hard to feel for his “my god, what have I done” moment when he’s crying over an American cake, a not-so-subtle signifier for the horrors he has perpetuated on the country he considered his greatest client. This is especially hard when Cohn’s hidden homosexuality amid his public homophobia is first revealed in a hazy smear of a cocaine-fueled orgy that Trump stumbles upon early in the film. There’s rarely a moment to explore that terror as the film doesn’t have time for it, reserving Cohn’s descent through Trump’s lens of cruelty and indifference.
The Apprentice can’t decide if it wants to mock or humanize Trump, delivering a few key moments that are dramatically decent but historically reduced to punchlines. The whiplash of its many glossy scenes of politics, sex, drugs, booze, glamour, and cosmetic surgery doesn’t build on much of anything, simplifying too much of the inhumanity to Trump’s three rules from Art of the Deal. Donald Trump’s legal team had apparently tried to block the release of this film, presumably because they believed it would make Trump look bad. Strangely enough, it’s not the smear job his base would think, but it’s not really a sympathetic picture either. There are plenty of hideous facts from Trump’s past that can be exploited for drama, but this film takes the CliffsNotes route, making more room for Stan and Strong’s chemistry than any meaningful insights on how Trump’s egotism infected America. For those not familiar with the Trump/Cohn tale, there’s enough here to be intriguing, but it’ll be a light review for the more historically astute who know there is more to Trump’s saga than greed, corruption, and family issues.