Movie: The Apprentice
Release Date: Oct. 11, 2024
Director: Ali Abbasi
Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Genre: Drama/Biographical
Oscar Potential: Actor, Supporting Actor
Rating: B
Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; always claim victory. According to "The Apprentice," these are the rules that lawyer Roy Cohn used to create a monster. These rules made Donald Trump the man the world knows today.
The second the film starts, director Ali Abbasi throws the audience into the deep end when a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) is named in a federal lawsuit alleging racial discrimination at an apartment complex he owns. At an exclusive restaurant in New York, he meets Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who is known for representing Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare. Trump enlists Cohn’s help in the matter. After witnessing the illegal tricks Cohn used to get the case tossed out, Trump begins to learn his ways.
From here, the film becomes a tragedy as the audience witnesses Trump's last shreds of humanity slip away. The final nail in this coffin comes after the death of a person close to Trump. The audience is afforded one last moment of vulnerability and emotion from him before he becomes completely cold to the outside world. After this point in the film, everything Trump does is for himself.
Coinciding with Trump’s rise is the fall of Roy Cohn, who is pushed aside by Trump as the film progresses. Trump, exercising all of Cohn’s lessons and claiming them as his own, further breaks away from the man he once looked up to.
Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong’s performances brilliantly capture this dynamic. Rather than portraying Donald Trump as a cartoonishly evil villain, Stan captures a humanity in Trump that audiences may not be familiar with. Throughout the film, Stan steadily adds more of Trump’s mannerisms and inflections, transforming into the exaggerated personality audiences know now.
Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, on the other hand, starts cold and ruthless and finishes as a feeble and powerless man. Strong lends nuance to the role, making the viewer detest Cohn at the start and feel sorry for him by the end. As Trump pushes him away, Cohn's humanity begins to come back, but it is too late to redeem his career as an immoral political fixer who gained everything through illegal means.
Through Trump and Cohn switching roles, writer Gabriel Sherman paints a vivid picture of how ruthless Trump has become. Allowing the audience to sympathize with someone as despicable as Roy Cohn allows them to see just how much Trump has changed since the beginning of the film.
This nuance in the film’s portrayal of both men is one of its most vital elements. If Stan and Strong were directed to play their characters in a satirical way, the film would feel like a parody. The ability to criticize Trump and Cohn while having them appear as human beings instead of caricatures provides for a grounded tone that can appeal to many people regardless of political beliefs. This film would have failed if the filmmakers had taken a less well-rounded approach.
While this nuanced look into Trump’s rise casts a strong, believable story for casual moviegoers, the film does not dig as deep as it could have. People who are already knowledgeable about Trump's rise will not learn much new. Certain sequences also feel like they drag on for a couple of minutes too long, and others lack a particular punch despite the film’s ability to present a scathing critique as a whole. Specifically, there are moments with Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova), his first wife, that leave little to no impact. Bakalova’s talents are relatively wasted in this film. While she does well with the material she is given, the role of Ivana draws little attention, save for one horrifying scene between her and Trump that will shock audiences.
Still, even when moments in the narrative become weaker, the filmmaking style will always keep the audience engaged. Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen utilized an Alexa 35 camera to capture the different eras in which the film takes place. The results are two types of grain, one that looks like the 16mm news cameras of the '70s and one that mirrors the broadcast video aesthetic of the '80s. This process allows the film to transport the audience back in time to where they feel like they are living in that moment.
While “The Apprentice” has its flaws, the film as a whole presents a compelling look into Donald Trump’s rise and provides hints as to why he became the man he is today.