The Apprentice Searches for Depth in Trump, But There’s None to be Found
I have no doubt that Ali Abbasi’s biopic drama The Apprentice would love to have keyed in on some previously buried incident or relationship in the life of Donald Trump that would serve as a narrative lynchpin in the act of trying to explain how this man, of all people, somehow became the central figure around which all of U.S. history and culture has revolved for almost a decade. The director’s scintillating prior feature, 2022’s Persian language psychological crime thriller Holy Spider also dealt with a destructive brand of delusional masculinity, but where the audience is able to truly plumb the psyche of that film’s compulsive serial killer, they bounce off here from the thickly tanned, orange hide of a man who is still, even after all these years, largely inexplicable. There are really two primary possibilities: We either can’t understand why Trump truly is the way he is, or we do understand it perfectly well, but it’s simply impossible for us to accept that it could really be so simplistic, so unexceptional as portrayed here. We want the circumstances that birthed the modern Donald Trump to be so exotic and strange as to be impossible to replicate, because if they’re mundane … well then, there would be all too many more Donald Trumps rolling down the assembly line. The Apprentice hews closer to the latter view, portraying the guy who would become the 45th president as more or less a simple fool, one who grew far beyond his means thanks to a shadowy mentor opening up the initial gates to facilitate his rise to power, removing any ethical boundaries that might have briefly slowed him down.
That’s also one of the film’s problems, as a pure piece of entertainment: It tells an intensely familiar, unexceptional story of mentorship and decaying morals among powerful, affluent men. We know this character archetype all too well: Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) is the scion of a wealthy family, son of an emotionally abusive father, seemingly motivated by a pathological need to prove himself and reclaim some sense of power or autonomy that he feels has been withheld from him. That drive of course creates vulnerability to influence by anyone who can understand and take advantage of it, and for the purposes of the story that man is Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the former Joseph McCarthy legal counsel who decides to take Trump under his wing, instinctually sensing a patsy who can be molded in his image.
In terms of its inherent structure, this simply isn’t a particularly unique or interesting relationship around which to base The Apprentice, because even if the viewer has literally never heard of Roy Cohn, could they not largely assume the presence of someone like him in the life of a young Donald Trump? Do we not assume that pretty much any fabulously wealthy captain of industry probably has a Roy Cohn or two in his own personal history, those father figures who were indispensable in teaching the dirty tricks and units of corruption necessary to continue the ascent up the ladder? That idea that Donald Trump would begin as a more or less normal, unexceptional individual and then be molded into a more corrupt and genuinely evil figure by exposure to this man is something we should almost be able to take for granted. This fact butts up against another reality inherent to Trump: As a character, he’s just not very interesting–just another greedy, potentially sociopathic rich asshole with daddy issues. He’s an object of interest today because of what he’s improbably done in the last 10 years, falling seemingly ass-backwards into the presidency and now threatening to do so once again, despite a mountain of indictments and seemingly crumbling mental faculties. And as he’s become more erratic over the years, less and less of the material presented in The Apprentice feels genuinely relevant to the shell of a symbol he’s become. The film would like to connect conversations Trump supposedly would have had in the 1970s with the compulsions that still drive him today, but it’s hard to accept he would even particularly remember those words, much less base his day to day actions around them.
With that said, the depiction by Stan of the young Donald Trump in the 1970s, around the time he first meets Roy Cohn, is no doubt The Apprentice‘s most intriguing quality. There’s at least a little bit of complexity to him here: He’s vain and preening, unquestionably naïve but energetically ambitious, coming off as something at least parallel to the types of American dreamers who make up the rank and file subjects of classical biopics. He’s a fool, but dangerously close to being a lovable fool, because of the implication that here in his early life there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly malicious to his aims–he just wants to be a “winner.” The film is at its most funny here as it depicts Trump’s greenhorn exposure to backroom power brokering, and you may find yourself chuckling at the character’s almost prudish discomfort with the excess and hedonism of the upper crust that he’s immediately exposed to in Cohn’s company. He wants what Cohn has, but he also seems to be deeply uncomfortable with it, even to fear it. Never do we understand for even a moment why Trump ever truly wants most of the things he purports to want as a young man. Is it solely to please or show up a distant father, the sort of guy who dresses down his eldest son at the dinner table for the supposed shame of becoming a commercial airline pilot? The Trump of The Apprentice just seems to want to win because he’s heard that’s what he should want.
This blank slate when it comes to the man’s genuine desires is such a common pitfall of attempting to examine the psyche of Trump, and The Apprentice offers little to no opinion on the matter. What does he truly believe about anything? Does he have ANY strong, genuine convictions about politics, economics, social issues? We don’t know, and there’s no hint of where the truth lies–anything Trump says can’t be trusted, as he continuously demonstrates that his opinion on any matter is for sale, available to whoever can help him acquire whatever prize he’s currently targeting. It’s why he’s such a difficult subject for this kind of film: His core beliefs, other than the obvious and enduring narcissism, are constantly blown to the winds. We can’t even really put a finger on why he particularly wants extravagant wealth, other than the accompanying prestige, as he seems to have no idea of how to enjoy wealth. He doesn’t enjoy recreation, or art, food or even seem to particularly enjoy sex. Nothing brings him real pleasure. Praise and respect are the sole thing we can say he craves.
In that vein, what the film does capture is Trump’s well-documented hero worship of alpha male “strong man” posturing, which is what draws him immediately into Cohn’s orbit. Jeremy Strong absolutely melts into the character here, crafting a Roy Cohn who is truly and extravagantly evil, a raging hypocrite in every capacity who belittles weaker men, calling them by gay epithets even as he engages in promiscuous sex with other men that would ultimately result in his death in 1986 after contracting HIV. Strong fills him with frightening intensity and focus, his unblinking gaze latched on anyone he thinks he can overpower with force of will. He teaches Trump his maxims for success, which involve constant attack and never admitting defeat under any circumstances. He also offers up the line that will eventually sever his own relationship from Trump after his illness becomes a public liability: “You have to be willing to do anything to anyone to win.”
Also acquitting herself well in The Apprentice is Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, the Czech-born model who is swept up into his glamorous lifestyle, becoming Trump’s first wife in 1977, though her relative lack of screen time and gradual drift from the story lessens Bakalova’s ability to offer an emotional counterbalance to Trump’s ever-expanding heartlessness and cruelty. In brief moments, she’s given a chance to extrapolate on Ivana’s own ambitions or attempts to offer an empathetic presence in Trump’s life, such as after the death of older brother Fred Trump Jr. in 1981, but largely this characterization mostly serves as a launching pad for Trump’s increasingly abusive, megalomaniacal behavior and characterization in the film’s weaker back half, as he descends into the bloviating (and bloated) form of Trump we more closely recognize today. The three children of this marriage are almost entirely absent in The Apprentice, which ultimately and sadly lands on Ivana as something of a prisoner, wondering (just like us) what happened to the vaguely human man she previously knew a handful of years earlier.
As the narrative shifts to the Reagan years, it quickly becomes clear that Trump is both living by and fundamentally misunderstanding a maxim he at one point throws at Ivana: “In life, there are two types of people, killers and losers.” Trump of course sees himself as the former, forever unable to see that he is in fact instead a loser who is constantly failing upward. This back half is dissatisfying in the sense that in a conventional biopic, this would be the “fall” of “rise and fall,” when the protagonist’s arrogance costs them everything, but in the case of Trump his bloviating only carries him to continuously higher levels of prestige. You can see the slow realization in his eyes of his seeming invincibility, the dawning acceptance that it really doesn’t matter what he says, because he’ll never face consequences for any of it. Cohn’s lessons work all too well, tricking Trump into actually believing in the “Trump the visionary businessman” character Cohn created for him. And because we absolutely do not live in a just universe, nothing ever comes along to burst his bubble, even though few have ever deserved it more. It’s now 40 years later, and the bubble is still somehow intact.
In the end, The Apprentice is a story whose central character wouldn’t really justify the telling of said story in normal circumstances, except for the fact that he eventually became a ruinous president of the United States. And without more insight–which genuinely isn’t available–into the man’s true character, and not just the shell he’s built for himself, Abbasi’s film is unable to reveal much of anything about our subject that we don’t already know. When Trump first meets Cohn, his initial greeting is the following: “Roy Cohn, from all the papers? You’re brutal.” But anyone who has lived on this Earth for the last eight years doesn’t need to learn any more about Trump to assume he means this as a compliment. That’s just who he is; an admirer of brutal men, fantasizing about achieving such brutality of his own. It’s safe to say he lived up to it.
Director: Ali Abbasi
Writer: Gabriel Sherman
Stars: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan
Release date: Oct. 11, 2024
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.