The Apprentice - a film review

*Warning – mild spoilers

In an early scene of The Apprentice, the camera glides over Donald J. Trump’s somewhat modest New York apartment. Trump is still young, ambitious, and eager to learn. There is a poster of Citizen Kane on the wall. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, but, like many background details in this terrific film, it tells us volumes. It is not Orson Welles whose career path Trump aims to emulate – it is Kane’s.

Like Kane, Trump came to money without lifting a finger. Like Kane, he leveraged his wealth to bolster his own ego and pursue political ambitions. Both cloaked themselves in the American flag, manipulating public opinion through demagoguery. Both grew into grotesque caricatures of themselves physically and morally. But while Kane ultimately turned into a ghost haunting his own castle, Trump reached the highest political office in the country.

The obvious difference between Charles Foster Kane, a fictitious construct, and Donald J. Trump, a construct that only feels fictitious, is in their intelligence. The sophisticated Kane masterminded his own moral corruption as a means to obtain unlimited power. Welles’ film, in large part, was about lofty ideals led astray by unchecked ambition and money. Trump has no ideals. But he harbors a massive appetite for success. And he has money.

The Apprentice starts with Trump’s desire to slither from under his father’s towering shadow. Young Trump is honest with himself enough to recognize his inefficiency as a novice developer. His business acumen is nil and he finds himself flailing around as a slumlord. He reaches out for guidance to the notorious lawyer, Roy Cohn, to bypass inconvenient housing laws. While Kane served as his own Svengali, Cohn readily steps into that role, beginning to mold Trump’s psyche.

Trump’s eponymous apprenticeship under Cohn, centered on the art of victory at all cost, provides the core of Ali Abbasi’s film. Initially shocked and disturbed by the lawyer’s utter lack of ethics, Trump quickly, and willingly, falls under his Machiavellian spell. By the film’s midpoint, he appropriates Cohn’s three rules of success as his own: attack, deny, never admit defeat.

Sebastian Stan, as Donald J. Trump, wisely avoids parody or impersonation. It is an enormously difficult part to play with conviction, but Stan finds touches of empathy even in the most unpleasant moments, of which there are plenty. His performance is richly nuanced when it could’ve been crass, and Stan manages the impossible. He renders Trump as a breathing human – as someone we no longer recognize in today’s news. The caliber of Stan’s performance gives weight to a slightly hurried script, and underscores the character’s tragedy. And it is a tragedy, although not as perceived by Trump.

Even though The Apprentice ends in the Reagan era, the story parallels Trump’s delusion of victory as a real estate mogul with the current state of affairs. The New York skyline is today’s America – a land promised to Trump by destiny of his own making. It’s up for grabs. Through fraud, deception, and demagoguery. And all it takes, as Trump learns from Cohn, is to drape the deceit in the American flag.

In the role of Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong is simply colossal. Lean and mean, with piercing, dead eyes and fake tan, the actor makes Cohn’s devilish allure eerily convincing. As a historical figure whose career was forged by the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Cohn on film could easily become a caricature. He is a perfect villain. Yet, with no apparent redeeming qualities, all predatory and pragmatically vicious, Strong’s Cohn is someone we care for in the end. In an unexpectedly tender moment, it is he, not Trump, who experiences a flash of regret. Already dying of AIDS, the lawyer is thrown a birthday party by Trump at Mar-a-Lago. By now, in the mid 1980s, Cohn is a mere shadow of his former self – disgraced, powerless, physically diminished. Trump belittles him in that special way only he can, then rolls in the birthday cake.

What happens next is The Apprentice’s most telling moment. The cake is in the shape of the American flag. Cohn looks at the Red, White, and Blue and breaks down. His entire life of deceit in the guise of patriotism has brought him to this juncture. For him, for Trump, and for their ilk, the ideals the Stars and Stripes stand for are nothing but slogans to swindle the suckers. In that poignant moment, Cohn acknowledges his own duplicity. And the contrition hurts.

We don’t know if that happened in real life. It is only a movie. A tremendous movie. But in real-life, Donald J. Trump is having that cake now – and he’s eating it, too.