The Apprentice – Michael’s Moments
Cohn’s three rules of life:
The first rule is: attack, attack, attack.
Rule two: admit nothing, deny everything. Truth is malleable.
Rule three: no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.
When I first heard those three rules in the movie, I was shocked at how much they echo the Donald Trump that lords over us now from the White House. And yet, The Apprentice was filmed more than two years ago and wasn’t released until just a couple of weeks before the election. So, the filmmakers had absolutely no idea that their subject would become the most powerful man in the world months after they wrote and produced this movie. What has to be true is that the sentiments behind these rules must be so obvious and apparent in the fabric of this ugly man that we can and should have seen this trainwreck coming long before it got all the way here.
As a biopic, there is no law that says what is in the film must be true. And certainly, the Trump campaign office offered up the following statement after the film had been released:
This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store. It belongs in a dumpster fire!
But I think you doth protest too much! Although Trump has threatened lawsuits against the filmmakers, we are more than six months later, and nothing has happened. It is also interesting that Apple cut the rental price on this film just after Trump announced tariffs on imported iPhones. (Could this be part of a fight between Trump and CEO Cook?)
In case you can’t tell, I have no love, not even a smidgeon of a like, for our orange turd president. We are living in an age where a junior high bully throws temper tantrums, makes obscenely stupid judgments, lacks basic insight into how nations, groups, and even people actually manage their affairs, and yet has his grubby, fast-food fingers inches away from the nuclear buttons. The man-child is a menace and has already likely caused the deaths of thousands of people unjustly.
But I’m not reviewing Donald Trump here – I’m supposed to be reviewing a movie. A question that has bothered me all week is how or whether I can separate my feelings for the real despicable man from my judgment of the movie? And I kept going back to the question of how a MAGAt would look at this movie? Would they applaud Trump’s embrace of Cohn’s rules? Would they see that this philosophy, if you want to call it that, is really what the world is all about? Would they embrace the idea that the only purpose in life is to win? That, as Cohn argued, the US isn’t a nation of laws, it is a nation of men? And if you want to win, you must understand and manipulate the man, not the laws?
So for a MAGAt, The Apprentice is just another superhero origin story…
The Apprentice – Story and Tone:
The Apprentice tells the story of Donald Trump starting at the point where he is working with his father managing properties in New York City in the early 1970s. The organization is being sued by the US Department of Justice for housing discrimination in their rental practices, and Donald finds representation from a certain Roy M. Cohn. Cohn, in the 70s, built a law practice defending a slew of shady characters, including mob members, Rupert Murdoch, Aristotle Onassis, certain members of the Catholic Church, and even George Steinbrenner.
Cohn, initially attracted to Trump’s good looks, likes the younger Trump, takes his business on as a client, and proceeds to teach Donald exactly how to win at the game of life. The first hour of the movie is all about their budding relationship, including how Cohn is able to arrange a massive tax abatement with the city for a dubious midtown hotel project of Trump’s. There are celebrations with massive quantities of booze, drugs, and sex. At the end of the first half is Trump’s wedding to Ivana, a feisty model from Eastern Europe.
The second hour of The Apprentice skips a decade forward and is concerned with Trump’s set of projects involving casinos in Atlantic City and the famous Trump Tower. In this hour, we learn just how well Trump learned from Cohn. Sick with AIDS, Cohn seeks help from his former protégé. But the Donald, no longer benefiting from his relationship with Cohn, pretty much throws him under the bus. During the second hour, the real DJT blossoms, and it isn’t pretty.
The Apprentice is a biopic – a movie dramatizing the life of someone, usually someone at least fairly well known. But the key word in that definition is that it “dramatizes” – it isn’t intended as a documentary – so what you see may or may not be what really happened. Instead, the filmmakers are trying to deliver to their audience their own impression of the subject. In the first hour, Donald is learning and growing his repertoire of nastiness. And Iranian director Ali Abassi, using a script from writer Gabriel Sherman, conveys a consistent and growing tone, not particularly of respect for Trump, but an understanding of the intensity of his relationship with Cohn.
The second hour isn’t as successful. Trump tries to live life the Cohn way, but struggles. Does he not have the intelligence or the fortitude to be as ruthless as Cohn was? Or is he simply so morally bankrupt that nothing really guides the man? The tone in the second half is splintered and, as several other viewers have pointed out, at times, bleeds into open parody. We are left with a disjointed array of events. It seems like the writer and the director, operating on a low budget anyway, simply got tired.
Related Movies: Border (Direction)
The Apprentice – Storytellers
Like our last film, The Brutalist, The Apprentice is what I call an ensemble movie. By that, I mean a movie that gets most of its energy, tone, and message from the interplay of a team of actors. In this case, it is between the two main characters, Donald Trump and Roy Cohn. But we can’t ignore the supporting performances from Trump’s father, Fred, and his first wife, Ivana. If you need a reason to see this film, it is because of the acting.
Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) – We all know who Donald Trump is now, but The Apprentice could be viewed as a sort of super-villain origin story. There are so many of the personality traits and tics that we have all come to hate about the man that are suggested in this movie. Sebastian Stan, who is known as the Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, seems to be having just a bit too much fun as he purses his lips, fondles his hair, and learns to demean and belittle everyone around him, all the while masturbating his shallow ego. It is a nomination-worthy performance.
Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) – But there is a reason the movie is called The Apprentice. It is clear, from the movie anyway, that Trump learned his worldview and developed his putrid personality under the steady tutelage of Roy Cohn. I suppose there can only be one Leading Actor nomination in any movie about Donald Trump, and, of course, it would be whomever plays him. But Strong’s performance is the superior one. Even seasoned politicians who knew the real Cohn were impressed with the accuracy of Strong’s embodiment. As a not-so-closeted gay man who ruthlessly destroyed the lives of gay federal workers, Strong is somehow able to embody the stark contradictions that Cohn embodied. After offering what Cohn must have believed was the best possible friendship and mentoring to Trump, he then suffers the desperate humiliation of being given knockoff cufflinks emblazoned, not with his name, but with Trump’s. There are significant exchanges between two alpha male dogs in this film, and Strong is leading the pack. If there is one reason to see The Apprentice, it is his performance!
Fred Trump (Martin Donovan) – And, yes, there is an old dog here too. Trump’s father, Fred. We’ve all heard that Trump’s father wasn’t exactly a nice guy, and this movie doesn’t do much to change that. Donovan does a good job exploring the role of the man whom many believe damaged Trump beyond all repair. Frankly, from the movie, I don’t get that – Fred is a demanding father trying to turn his boys into men. What we don’t really get from the movie is more of an understanding of where Trump’s money originally came from, and I wish that was explored more.
Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova) – We have two alpha male dogs, and an older one, so of course we need a bitch. Bakalova seems to be a perfect Ivana, although, admittedly, I never paid much attention to the first wife, or any of them, for that matter, because they all seemed like tools for Donald as he claws his way up the social ladder, to be discarded when he reaches the next rung. Ivana suggested that Donald raped her in their divorce legal proceedings. Did it happen as portrayed in the movie? We, of course, will never know – even the bully Donald won’t admit what he did, will he? Even if he did, would it matter – ‘I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it’ ? (In Bakalova’s only Oscar-nominated performance, she almost successfully seduced Rudy Giuliani, another Trump lackey.)
Related Movies: A Different Man; Avengers: Endgame; Black Panther (Stan)/ The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Strong)/ Tenet (Donovan)/ Borat Subsequently Moviefilm; Guardians of the Galaxy (Bakalova)
The Apprentice – Movie Magic
Both the cinematographer and the lead editor are Danish, and they both worked on a terrific film I reviewed almost three years ago, The Worst Person in the World. Then, and now, I thought the cinematography and editing were well done and one of the highlights of the movie.
The Apprentice unfolds in two segments. The first hour takes place in the mid-1970s, while the second is about a decade later. To capture more of a feel for those decades, the cinematographer chose 16mm film for the 70s and then added a filter that produces a kind of VHS feel for the second hour. The change is noticeable and adds to the movie magic of the period.
Editing the film took a bit of extra effort. In the first place, since it was filmed almost entirely in Ontario, Canada, the editors had to be careful about too much exposure that would lead viewers to mistakenly place the setting there instead of New York. Instead, the filmmakers wisely chose to intersperse newsreel footage in many cases extolling the work of Donald Trump. That way, they could give the New York location some extra credibility. Still, though, the movie, at times, feels a little awkward.
Related Movies: The Worst Person in the World; Border (Film Editing)/The Worst Person in the World (Cinematography)
The Apprentice – World Building
We are, unfortunately, living in the Donald Trump world now. But this movie tries to take us back to where it got started, New York City of the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately, or not, I lived there from 1978 until 1986 and have some knowledge of the city as it was at that time. President Ford never used the words “Drop Dead” – that was a newspaper headline – but he did deny federal assistance to bail the city out of its fiscal crisis in 1975. And, much to everyone’s surprise, the city, with help from the state, businesses, and non-profits, did manage to pull itself out of the brink. During my time in the city, I was always simply amazed that the city, as big and complicated as it was, managed to function even half as well.
But I never got the feel that The Apprentice captured the city quite as richly as it seemed in my mind. Shots of the city seemed “canned”, almost as bad as stock footage on which the movie was superimposed. Yes, there are a few street scene photographs of real places, but all of the intense interactions between the characters are done indoors or in non-descript locations. And there is a reason – this film was never shot in New York City but, apparently, entirely in Ontario, Canada. (Is this one of the reasons Trump is now out to get the country?) With a budget of just $15M, it probably couldn’t have been done in the Big Apple. I don’t give the film a whole lot of kudos in the production design areas, despite attempts to recreate street scenes forty and fifty years old.
But the movie did do a good job with the clothing and hairstyles. I wore some of those hairstyles and bought clothes like that. So we can give the film some world-building credit.
Related Movies: Babylon; Judas and the Black Messiah (Makeup & Hairstyling)
The Apprentice – Sound & Music
The musical score for The Apprentice is, frankly, uninspired. I’ve listened to the soundtrack album five or six times now and there is little in the music that commends itself. Yes there are a couple of moments where the music correctly highlights scenes in the movie, but overall there is no consistent theme here and no compelling reason to pay attention. Part of the reason might be the fact that this was a collaborative effort among three different composers. Martin Dirkov is Danish and, apparently, composed half of the music by himself. The other half was done by two Irish composers, David Holmes and Brian Irvine. Both composers attempt to incorporate the sounds of the 70s and 80s, as well as some references to classical themes. But overall, there is just nothing about the music to talk about.
The sound team (18 people credited) did fine, but, again I have nothing to talk about. I guess that means it is entirely adequate…
Related Movies: Border (Musical Score)
The Apprentice – What Others Think
Oscar Buzz – The Apprentice received two acting nominations for its two main characters; however, neither one won the Oscar. With an OQI of 4 points, the movie ranks 14th out of all 24 general-interest movies, a respectable but not great showing.
Oscar nominations for The Apprentice (2 nominations/0 wins) :
Leading Actor (Sebastian Stan)
Supporting Actor (Jeremy Strong)
Audience Sentiment – An audience rating of 73 for The Apprentice ranks this movie 12th out of 24 general-interest movies, tied with Alien: Romulus (that’s interesting!). (The source metrics are consistent, so this is a good measure.) Viewer comments lauded the acting “Standard biopic elevated by performances and craft” and “The acting (is hot).” But they also talked about the real-life characters, Trump and Cohn: “Who’s the devil, and is there sympathy for him?”; “ An entertaining and surreal glimpse into Trump”; and “The Price of ambition”. Probably because of the distribution problems, this movie hasn’t been seen by a huge number of people.
Critical Reviews – Critical response was less favorable with a fairly consistent critical rating of 68, ranking the movie 17th out of 24 general-interest movies, tied with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (another interesting comparison!).
Critical comments reflected the fact that it is very difficult to separate one’s opinion of the movie from one’s opinion of the subject! Ben Kenigsberg (RogerEbert) tried with “The Apprentice is not a panoramic biopic but a movie about a friendship.” Trying to look at just the movie, Beatrice Loayza (Sight&Sound) called it “A generic villain origin story” but added “the worst kinds of movies are ones that leave no impression at all – like The Apprentice, a mildly amusing, profoundly forgettable saga about the rise of Donald Trump.” But, in the end, she fails: “Of course this man is capable of such cruelty – we know that all too well.” MaryAnn Johanson (FlickFilosopher) doesn’t even pretend to separate them, “If this was fiction we’d call it outrageously implausible. As reality, it’s the epitome of the banality of evil.” And, finally, Manohla Dargis (New York Times) mixes the two all together: “While the movie encourages you to laugh at (Donald’s) extremes, his vanity and braggadocio, the one thing the filmmakers don’t prepare you for, even if you should know better, is the magnitude of the American tragedy rapidly unfolding before you.”
Combined Rating – Combining both audience and critical reaction, The Apprentice comes in with a 70 rating, placing it 28th out of all 35 nominated movies, tied with Alien: Romulus (another monster movie!).
Where to Watch: Apple ($3); Prime/Google/Fandango/YouTube ($6)
