Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
I don't believe in tying reviews to an opening date anyway, so I'm not going to apologize for writing about this film now. Surely The Apprentice, an account of Donald Trump and his formative years in New York in the 70s and 80s, sports its timeliness even more today than when it opened a few months ago. The title is reference not to Trump's TV show but to his relationship with Roy Cohn, the notorious attorney (he helped send the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, and gleefully served as Joseph McCarthy's hatchet man), who took young Donald under his vulture-sleek wing and taught him the rules of engagement—a kind of School for Sociopaths, with Trump as top of class.
Both Trump (Sebastian Stan) and Cohn (Jeremy Strong) emerge as creatures out of a sci-fi picture: Trump doughy and unformed, something from a planet without gravity, and Cohn a humanoid reptile, practically flicking his prehensile tongue in the direction of power. This is a monster movie, in which the two principal players physically disintegrate as the story goes along. Cohn begins to transform because of AIDS, but Trump's rotting seems to exude from the spiritual corruption inside him; he begins wearing more make-up, and when we see him without it, his face looks like it's erupting in sheer sleaze. There are various ironies embedded in the narrative, including the way Trump's germophobia kicks into gear when he suspects Cohn of being sick—and yet the infection has happened years before, by osmosis, and Trump is being transformed as surely as Jeff Goldblum's scientist in The Fly. The core of ego grows stronger as the flesh bulges, the hair falls out, and the skin becomes studded with pustules. Not for nothing does director Ali Abbasi include a gross surgical sequence of Trump's liposuction and scalp-tightening.
The mentoring between Cohn and Trump constitutes the best part of Gabriel Sherman's screenplay; the tension drops when we take time out to see Trump romance and/or desecrate Ivana (Maria Bakalova), the first of his wives. Abbasi, the Iranian-born director whose previous film was the very blunt Holy Spider, drapes the movie in a dingy light that perhaps suits the satanic mood (and New York City's period of peak grunge), although the look becomes a little wearisome at times. The tone plays around with parody: in the early moments, as disco pulses, Trump clumps down a New York City sidewalk in a send-up of Travolta's strut in Saturday Night Fever, and when he first locks eyes with Cohn at a dark Manhattan restaurant it's a daft re-creation of a romance-novel moment-of-destiny.
But Abbasi and Sherman and their actors aren't here to ridicule Trump. There is clearly some attempt at understanding how the catastrophe of Trump happened, including time spent with Trump's asshole father Fred (Martin Donovan, very canny) and alcoholic older brother (Charlie Carrick), whose self-destruction seems entirely understandable. In the Trump-Cohn story there is something of the arc of Prince Hal and Falstaff, complete with eventual betrayal, and the filmmakers pay attention to that with far more sincerity than their subjects deserve.
The Apprentice doesn't craft its tale with subtlety, but what exactly is the point of delicacy in a world where the rise of Donald Trump has destroyed the usefulness of subtlety, or really any kind of satire? The film delights in showing Trump's awkwardness at parties, his teetotaler eyes searching the room for a transactional meeting to be made as K.C. and the Sunshine Band's "I'm Your Boogie Man" plays and men pair off behind barely-closed doors. But even this isn't mockery—and mockery of Trump doesn't seem to move the needle on this monstrous figure anyway. The Apprentice is smart enough to know that. Whether it does anything that helps us deal with the Boogie Man, I have no idea.
February 14, 2025
