‘The Apprentice’, Reviewed: Donald Trump’s Immoral Achievements

The one element of cinematic art that is spotlighted in ‘The Apprentice’ is acting. The film is a dramatization of Donald Trump’s rise in the 1970s and 1980s and features a cast of characters including members of the Trump family and New York political and social luminaries – primarily lawyer-slash-fixer Roy Cohn, whose mentorship of Trump offers one explanation for the film’s title. The actors who play these roles, including Sebastian Stan, as Trump, and Jeremy Strong, as Cohn, provide a kind of litmus test for performance styles—and for the power (or failure) of visual compositions to showcase them.

Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, the film opens with twenty-something Donald (we’ll call the characters by their first names to distinguish them from the real people) experiencing a severe case of outside-borough syndrome. He works alongside his father, Fred Trump, Sr. (Martin Donovan), and manages Trump Village, a middle-class apartment complex on Coney Island. Donald’s work is dirty: he goes door to door collecting rent, often in cash, threatens eviction and faces insults and even physical aggression from tenants. He wants more – namely to become a real estate player in Manhattan – and he’s starting big, with a plan to renovate the Commodore Hotel, next to Grand Central Terminal. There is a vision behind his greatness: New York City was in financial trouble at the time and was widely considered to be in irreversible decline, but Donald was confident that the city would bounce back and that he could help make New York great again .

Donald’s idea of ​​New York was Manhattan – the bright lights, the movers and shakers – and he desperately wanted to be part of high society. Donald was admitted to the selective private restaurant and nightclub Le Club and was seen as a relative nobody. But, the film suggests, he was nevertheless spotted – while sitting alone after a disastrous date – by one of the club’s most prominent members, Roy Cohn, who invites the awkward young fighter to his banquet table and introduces him to two mafia chapters that’s there too. Donald explains that he is in the real estate business (and is angry when he is identified as “Fred Trump’s child”) and says the company is in trouble due to a federal lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in the selection of tenants for Trump properties. Roy gives unsolicited advice: argue, let the government work, don’t admit anything. When the unresolved charges threaten to destroy Donald’s deal with the Commodore, he recruits Roy to officially represent the company in court.

In the film’s story, Donald’s success and his descent into moral turpitude are linked by the bare-knuckle tactics Roy uses to help him achieve his fame and fortune. Donald, a worthy student, ultimately lives his personal life in an equally ruthless manner. Donald is constantly preoccupied with women (Roy tells him, “I bet you fuck a lot”), but Donald nevertheless has a romantic streak; When Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova) shows up at Le Club, he quickly moves from flirtation to dating. But when he tells Roy he is going to marry her, Roy first scoffs and then insists that Ivana sign a prenup – a demand that almost ends the engagement. It is exemplary of Donald’s Queens provincialism that, even as he figures in the city’s nightlife, he idealizes the institution of marriage and the lifelong union of his parents, Mary (Catherine McNally) and Fred Sr..

Sherman, a journalist, delves deep into the practical aspects of Donald’s business and its political background, which are by far the most striking aspects of the film. In the courtroom for the racial bias case, Roy displays nerve of comic dimensions, as when he challenges a black investigator’s mention of white tenants on the grounds that the witness cannot assume their race based on their appearance. But that show of daring is small compared to Roy’s blackmailing of a federal official behind the lawsuit. Roy casually confronts the official at a restaurant (and does so in Donald’s presence), shows him photos suggesting an extramarital relationship (and homosexual relationships), and reminds him that homosexuals are barred from federal employment. Soon after, the Trumps get away with a slap on the wrist, and the Commodore deal goes through. Roy communicates his operating principle, a sports analogy, to Donald: “Play the man, not the ball.” Roy leads Donald to his ‘playroom’, which is filled with audio equipment, and teaches Donald how it’s done: by placing microphones when he has sensitive conversations with potential adversaries, and then using his surreptitious recordings as central weapons in his battle against them . What Donald learns from Roy, as Donald puts it, is that there are two kinds of people: killers and losers; Ivana has doubts and wonders: “It’s good not to be a murderer, right?” But Donald adopts Roy’s three rules as his own: “attack, attack, attack”; “admit nothing, deny everything”; and always “claim victory and never admit defeat.”

Throughout the remainder of the film, Donald demonstrates his mastery of these methods in a ruthless and brutal series of betrayals, disloyalties, and atrocities. Roy takes him to a world of corrupt power that proves to be irresistibly seductive. He welcomes him to a party he’s hosting with the joking declaration: “If you’re indicted, you’re invited.” Among the friends Roy introduces Donald to are George Steinbrenner (Jason Blicker), Rupert Murdoch (Tom Barnett) and Roger Stone (Mark Rendall). But when Roy warns Donald against investing in Atlantic City casinos, Donald quickly turns on him and pushes his mentor into virtual exile, dishing out verbal insults and practical humiliations. Donald treats Ivana with similar contempt and then rapes her. (Both the real Trump and the real Ivana claim rape never happened.) As gruesome as the scene is, it has little practical consequence in the film, as Ivana has little independent existence in her — but there is something telling going on. exchange, too beautiful to spoil, between her and Roy, which hints at the depth of her despair. When Donald’s troubled brother Fred, Jr. (Charlie Carrick), named Freddy, who was an alcoholic, dies in 1981, the loss passes Donald by without even a shadow. “The Apprentice” locates the root of both brothers’ pathologies in Fred Sr.’s brief, businesslike cruelty.