The Apprentice review - cartoon version of
chump-in-chief Donald Trump's early years
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When this lenient and indulgent TV movie-style
treatment of Donald Trump's early adventures in
70s landlordism premiered at Cannes earlier this
year, I thought he wouldn't mind - it does,
after all, pull so many punches. But Trump is
now proving his decreasing political nous and
indeed decreasing grasp of reality with a rant
on the subject; the whole thing might well go on
a special Times Square billboard. But in
whetting audience's appetite for the film, he
might once again in his career be making
promises he can't keep.

The Apprentice is about his relationship with
dark legal sorcerer and Nixon intimate Roy Cohn,
the bully who taught him to lie to others and
himself. Director Ali Abbasi has given us
fascinating monsters in the past with Holy
Spider and Border but the monstrosity here is
almost sentimental, a cartoon Xeroxed from many
other satirical Trump takes and knowing
prophetic echoes of his political future. It's
basically a far less original picture, its
ambience borrowed from Scorsese and Coppola -
with Donald's deadbeat elder brother Fred even
getting a "Fredo" scene where he gets
embarrassingly, tearfully drunk at a big event,
like the loser he is. And like so many film-
makers these days, Abbasi will keep swooning
over the picturesque sleaze of 70s New York.

There's a moderate hair-and-makeup performance
by Sebastian Stan as the young Donald himself,
preening himself on his supposed resemblance to
Robert Redford (the surgical liposuction and
scalp-reduction scenes are gruesome). Jeremy
Strong is much more interesting and effectively
threatening as Cohn, with his strange physical
stillness and lizardly stare, catching the young
Trump's flinching glance in an elite members
club and staring at him in the men's room. The
voltage goes up when Strong is onscreen - which
is not enough - especially when he admits Donald
to his hideous townhouse party for all the other
disreputable movers and shakers: "If you're
indicted, you're invited!"

The Cohn angle and rather wasted asset of
Strong's casting are what makes this story
original - but so much of the time he's absent
and we just get the story of Donald's rise to
the top with first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova)
at his side, doing the mega-marble interior
decor in Trump Tower. The other great influence
in Donald's life, his glowering and finally
envious dad Fred (Martin Donovan) is shrewdly
represented.

The rumour of a rape scene in the film, along
with the disclaimer at the beginning about
fictionalisation and the theme of Donald
submitting to Roy's ethos of power worship, had
many here beforehand expecting a moment like the
one in Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain, a
secret chapter of violence and shame and power.
But it's not like that, or not exactly. In the
film, Donald rapes Ivana, who had been taunting
him about his hair and weight - and this moment
is every bit as hateful and misogynistic and
shocking as you would expect. (In reality, Ivana
later retracted her allegation of rape; Trump
always denied it and said his former wife's
interpretation of events was false.) But then
the film returns to its usual breezy pastiche-
montage of amoral narcissism and conceit. So
often, Donald comes across as nothing much more
than a rascally and tiresome chump.

There is something very pathetic about Roy's
final illness and his humiliation at the hands
of the ungrateful Donald, but again the film
comes close to a mood of glum yet knowing
resignation in the face of this ugly and banal
callousness, which has had to be rather
obviously pointed up with a dialogue scene
between Roy and Ivana.

In sketching out his pre-White-House career, The
Apprentice worryingly moves us back to the old
Donald, the joke Donald who had a cameo in Home
Alone 2 and of course his own hit TV show, the
joke that is now beyond unfunny. It feels obtuse
and irrelevant.

* The Apprentice screened at the Cannes film
festival. It is in US cinemas now, and in UK
cinemas from 18 October.



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