“If someone steps on your toe, you shoot them with a fucking bazooka.” That’s Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump towards the end of Ali Abassi’s new film The Apprentice, co-starring Jeremy Strong and currently bombing in theaters. Trump bluffed a lawsuit when the movie premiered at Cannes in May; subsequently, no studio would touch it except Briarcliff Entertainment. While they brought similarly embattled movies like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Spotlight to critical and commercial success (not to mention Oscars), it’s unlikely The Apprentice will even make back its $19 million budget in the United States. That’s paltry in contemporary Hollywood, where Mission: Impossible 8 is made for $300 million dollars rather than 15 movies for $20 million or less. Sean Baker, Anora director and likely winner of the Best Director Oscar next March, recently sang the same old song about films for adults: “Where are the films like Kramer vs. Kramer? Where are the Robert Altman films? They don’t exist…”
The Apprentice is a film for adults; it’s a “human story,” “a character story,” as Baker put it. Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay, announced in May 2018, follows a typical biopic structure familiar to anyone half-serious about movies, all wedded to equally familiar truisms: power corrupts, the student becomes the teacher, you can’t pick your parents…
On that note, Sebastian Stan told Deadline that, “And then we have to stop talking about him like this separate thing…” The interviewer is incredulous: “What do you mean?”
Stan took the words right out of my mouth: “We keep referring to him as if it’s sort of, oh, can you imagine that he’s capable of feelings? I actually feel he is one of the most emotional people out there actually out there in terms of reactivity. That’s the word, his woundedness [sic]. But I think we have to stop separating ourselves from him and therefore kind of giving ourselves a pass. It’s easier to just objectify him and then just we can just throw all we want at him. We have to kind of understand that he was born on this planet and he shits on a toilet like the rest of us. Things happen as you grow up and you evolve and I don’t feel like any of us are spared because if you had been following that trajectory that he was on, who’s to say that you would’ve been more morally true, that you would have turned out a better and more conscientious person, or not? I think we have to kind of start looking at the things that even we don’t want to admit, but feel very familiar about him, to us. Those are the things that, if you’re looking at the behavior that we’ve adopted from him, there’s not a lot of us that are behaving any differently right now. And the way we’re treating people and the way we are attacking one another and the brutality that’s happening online is the result.”
Perhaps the most original aspect of The Apprentice is its view and treatment of Donald Trump as a person—not a monster, not a phenomenon, not a God, but, as Stan put it, someone who goes to the bathroom like the rest of us. “Everyone wants to have their cock sucked by a supermodel,” Stan as Trump tells his ghostwriter late in the film, and he’s right. Benevolence is not in abundance any more than Trump’s actions, words, and policies are original; his presidency is the delirious endpoint of the fusion of entertainment and politics in America. He’s already destroyed the entire framework and, to borrow a word from his current opponent, context of what it means to be President of the United States. In 1987, Joe Biden was forced to drop out of the Democratic primary when he was revealed as a plagiarist in his speeches; his current Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris plagiarized one of her books from Wikipedia and NBC News, and nobody cares. “Anyone but Trump” sounds more and more literal every day—ANYONE!
Jeremy Strong is hammy but enjoyable as Roy Cohn, never capturing the nasal whine of Cohn’s voice but making up for it in pure energy and commitment. He’s not a great actor, not someone with an enormous amount of range, but he’s sort of like the American Gary Oldman, but of course much better. Strong likes prosthetics, costumes, accents, and all sorts of baubles, but he always ends up looking and sounding like himself; a leading man stuck in a character actor’s body and brain!
Stan, who hadn’t registered for me before, is fantastic as Trump, delivering one of the only well-rounded and complicated portrayals of Trump on screen. Josh Brolin as George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s 2008 film was fine, but a one-note joke; Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon worked, but it was kabuki, a performance about Nixon rather than simply a performance of Nixon. Stan as Trump grows into the personality the public has known for nearly 40 years, and he’s got the gestures down—the “okay sign,” the sarcastic sotto voce asides, the lilting and lyrical quality his voice takes on when he doesn’t know what to say—but Abassi is smart enough to underplay everything we know well, and to save it all for the end.
This is Trump in A Star is Born, with Cohn dying so he may live; instead of walking into the sea or hanging himself, Cohn dies slowly of AIDS, something he never admits, and Trump develops the germaphobic paranoia he’s exhibited ever since. After giving Cohn cubic zirconia cufflinks (inscribed “TRUMP”) for his final birthday, Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova) simply says, “Donald has no shame.” Earlier, when Cohn’s longtime partner Russell dies of AIDS, he lays into Trump in public, shouting “I’m glad to see you’ve lost your last shred of decency.” Trump loses it, tell the clearly sick Cohn to “step back” and that “tenants were complaining about Russell, WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?!?!!?” Cohn’s mantra (“admit nothing, deny everything”) and behavior disturbs Trump at first, but by the time Trump Tower has been realized, he has no problem throwing an old friend, an old partner, an old father figure, into the cold. He couldn’t deal with what was happening to Cohn, and he shut down.
The Apprentice is an enormously depressing film because it shows that Trump could’ve been a great man. Look at this person with all of this energy, confidence, and showmanship, and look at the breaks that turned him into the bitter and bigoted brewer of all of our frustrations today: his parents were checked out, his older brother was a drunk and died young, and his one foray into Broadway musicals flopped (this isn’t covered in the movie). Who can say that you or I would fare any better in his situation? But people yell and scream and deny reality like babies because they can’t accept what Stan says, that we all want what he wants: everything.
Every other contemporary film that’s treated Trump like a supernatural monster has only made him more mysterious and powerful in our minds. In The Apprentice, he’s finally human, and we can finally see him in the cinema face to face.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith