Flasz On Film

What point could there possibly be in making a biopic of Donald J. Trump, the newly re-elected president of the United States of America? To discredit a man who is now a convicted criminal and an adjudicated rapist? To alter the course of history? It may have been at the time when this movie was originally being thought about, in 2018, at the height of what is now correctly described as Trump’s first (not only) term in office, but it isn’t true anymore.  

What came to be known as The Apprentice originated when Gabriel Sherman, a man who wrote a book about Roger Ailes and, as an aside, penned the script to Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day: Resurgence, was asked to write a movie about young Donald Trump’s rise to prominence as a property mogul in New York and about his relationship with his early mentor Roy Cohn. However, the project languished in development hell until Ali Abbasi joined as director, Sebastian Stan was tapped to play the lead role, and Jeremy Strong was cast as Cohn. But that was long after Trump had left office, in 2023, and I suppose when all signs on heaven and earth were pointing to a strong possibility of his comeback.  

Despite the fact The Apprentice was received very well by critics after its Cannes premiere, Trump’s people fought tooth and nail to stop its release in the States citing it as a “defamatory hatchet job” which—in the Shakespearean vein of the-lady-doth-protest-too-much-ism—immediately signaled that Abbasi and Sherman were onto something. Was Trump afraid of what this movie contained? Was he worried it could sway the outcome of the election? Well, it didn’t. In fact, it couldn’t possible have done so because, as we should be all well aware, people who brought Trump to power this November either didn’t care or didn’t mind that he might be completely unfit for office, so watching a movie recounting how he got started wouldn’t have possibly changed anybody’s mind about him. People who despise him emerged from the screening with their beliefs confirmed and enriched with further context and people who love him or don’t mind him probably didn’t go out to see it because it’s “fake news.” 

Therefore, I can only surmise that The Apprentice is not a political document intended to sway the popular opinion of the here and now, but rather one that aims to add much needed cultural context to a discourse people might decide to have long after this era has run its course. And as such, there isn’t much interest in discussing how well Sebastian Stan managed to capture Trump’s well-known idiosyncrasies or how methodical Strong was in his portrayal of Cohn. For all I care, their mission was not to lampoon the characters they played, nor was it to embellish them or to imitate them in any capacity. They are here to capture certain aspects of their combined history that will allow us to understand and contextualize how Trump adopted the set of beliefs he currently espouses or how he continues to get away with everything and like a cat land safely on his feet despite the height he’s dropped from. We find Trump as a young businessman desperate to make an impact at all cost and over the course of the film we begin to put two and two together to comprehend the extent of his cunning and the lengths he was prepared to go to in order to get his way.  

To this end, The Apprentice offers a particularly intriguing insight into the de facto making-of of the Trump presidency, as it refrains from taking an emotional stance on the matter one way or another. Abbasi stays at arm’s length from the material and avoids the pitfalls of a McKay-esque disembowelment in the vein of Vice or a pearl-clutching afterschool special we’d come to expect from a traditional prestige biopic. His camera is functional, practical, immediate and era-appropriate and in effect it adds to what I can only refer to as a Lars von Trier-esque attempt at conveying the central themes and using historical events (or their artistically licenced approximations) as tools serving this goal.  

However, in contrast to what von Trier would have served having been asked to do so, Abbasi always remains entertaining. There’s an undercurrent of cheap glitz to the horror he outlines which perhaps reflects the reality of what it feels like to follow a guy like Trump around. Stan’s Trump is full of bluff, bluster and hot air. His words are big and empty. Equally, the actor’s take is measured and researched. He doesn’t go for an imitation but rather attempts to get a few tics and flourishes right enough to get the audience to fill in the blanks and thus he avoids slipping into uncanny valley. At the same time, Abbasi’s visuals are both grainy and spritzy. Festive and lurid. And in consequence, the movie is both fun and scary. Easy on the uptake and completely soul-shattering because it’s made with great flair and the stuff it smuggles under the epidermis of functional entertainment is bone-chilling, specifically because it is so easy to map its elements onto real life.  

Hence, The Apprentice is like a glossary to Trump America, a booklet of codewords to understand exactly what Trump means when he says what he says and does what he does. What is more, it tells us just as much this man has absorbed, like a vampire, from people he interacted with and how little care he had for their wellbeing once he extracted whatever he needed. In effect, Abbasi’s movie—and I understand the futile irony of making such comparisons—is a modern-day equivalent of a movie one could have made in the seventies about that time Adolf Hitler got turned away from art school, how he went to war and came back defeated, and how he found purpose in identifying an enemy for himself, and the entire nation as it turned out, to hate. That’s what I think the mission of this movie is. 

Now, the question remains if it will hang onto the zeitgeist for long enough to inspire a post-Trump debrief or will it be merely a flash in the pan and a momentary record of impotent rage on behalf of those who couldn’t find a way to speak to American people in the way that would counter Trump’s empty promises of hollow boosterism. At least it’s there to be watched and hopefully it will remain available for all to see because I can only hope that the world will eventually shake off its populist virus and come back into the tent.  

Until then, I fear we’ll be cheering this movie on and having our own rallies within small echo chambers, while the people who drank the Kool-aid will never avail themselves of The Apprentice and its hybrid Scorsese-meets-von-Trier dissonant beauty that comes with watching something as alluring and beautiful as it is frightening and disgusting.