There are bad reviews that are better to receive than good ones. Speaking of The Apprentice, Donald Trump called the film “a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out… to try and hurt the greatest political movement in the history of our country”. Further still, “The writer of this pile of garbage [is] a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited… HUMAN SCUM.”
It’s hit home then. Amusingly, it is exactly this kind of response – demented attack and denial – by Trump to any sort of trouble that the film explains so convincingly and entertainingly. The Apprentice is a vigorous account of Trump’s long relationship with the vicious, McCarthyite and ultimately disbarred lawyer Roy Cohn, from 1973, when the 27-year-old Trump first met Cohn, then a power-broker in New York, to Cohn’s death from Aids in 1986. Despite the title, the movie has, thankfully, nothing to do with Trump’s atrocious reality TV show.
The story of the relationship between Trump and Cohn, the apprentice eventually outdoing his master in bullying and dishonesty, arrogance and aggression, has been well studied before, notably in a Vanity Fair essay, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s ruthless symbiosis changed America” by Marie Brenner in 2017. The film, however, originated in a script researched and developed by another Vanity Fair writer, Gabriel Sherman. Producer Amy Baer then sought a director who would not just turn it into another obvious polemic. She selected Iranian-Danish Ali Abbasi, whose films in Swedish and Persian have won prizes at Cannes but is probably best known here for having directed the apocalyptic last two episodes of The Last of Us. The movie he has delivered (shot in Toronto) has a punkish, almost early-Scorsese energy, filmed in quasi-documentary style, with a great core cast.
Young Donald (Sebastian Stan), already an oaf but not yet fully formed, encounters the narcissistic, intimidating Roy (Jeremy Strong; Kendall Roy in Succession) in a private club. Cohn, it rapidly becomes clear, is both gay and homophobic, apparently attracted to Trump, yet ostentatiously deriding “fairies”.
When Trump complains that the family real estate firm is being prosecuted for racial discrimination against its tenants, Cohn tells him to sue the government for defamation, a course of action that surprises him. When it comes to court, Cohn represents the Trumps and, knowing the case hopeless, blackmails the married judge with photos of him having sex with boys.
Cohn buys Trump a $1,100 suit and tells him he has to do something about his big ass. He coaches him on how to court and bully the press, he introduces him to politicians, gangsters and celebrities. Trump soon learns Cohn’s rules. Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is. Forget the ball, get the man. There is no morality, nothing matters except winning. Everybody wants to suck a winner’s cock.
Cohn gives Trump, grovellingly grateful for Cohn’s ruthless interventions on his behalf, three universal instructions. 1) Attack, attack, attack. 2) Admit nothing, deny everything. 3) No matter what happens, claim victory and never admit defeat. At the end of the film, we see Trump present these rules as his own to the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal.
The apprentice learns only too well, the monster gets the better of his maker. As Cohn loses power and becomes mortally ill, Trump treats him with not just disdain, refusing to take his calls, but physical abhorrence, hosting a grotesque last dinner for him at Mar-a-Lago, at which he gives him cufflinks engraved with his own name and then has the place fumigated.
The Apprentice succeeds in never descending into easy satire, holding a balance between repulsion and empathy (almost, anyway). Strong is alarming as Cohn, staring threateningly, flickering his tongue. Stan is terrific at embodying embryonic versions of Trump’s mannerisms and brutishnesses. Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, star of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, is superb as Ivana, almost Trump’s equal as an operator, dismissing the pre-nup Trump and Cohn offer her. Even after Trump rapes her (a fictionalised account of an incident the real Ivana Trump described in her divorce deposition in 1990 but then retracted), she turns on a big smile for the opening of his doomed Atlantic City casinos.
You may think that you know enough already, and never want to watch a film about Trump. The Apprentice, though, deserves to be seen. It’s genuinely clarifying.
“The Apprentice” is in cinemas now
[See also: Putin stares down the West]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break