There’s a scene late in “The Apprentice,” the new film directed by Ali Abbasi about the relationship between Donald J. Trump and his attorney and mentor Roy Cohn, that’s akin to Dr. Frankenstein realizing in horror just what he has made.
An ailing, AIDS-stricken Cohn (Jeremy Strong) is being uncomfortably fêted at the palatial Florida estate Mar-a-Lago for his birthday. His longtime protégé, Trump (Sebastian Stan), seems to have ascended to the height of his powers (how things would develop three decades later is not yet known at this mid-1980s moment). Empowered by his own hubris, Trump builds and borrows and beds with impunity — all with a freewheeling sense of gleeful combativeness.
After an aggressive and somewhat insulting birthday toast, Trump wheels out an American flag-shaped birthday cake festooned with sparklers, an ode to Cohn’s oft-repeated professions of love for country. Cohn, for the first time in the film, looks shaken. It’s the icing on top of what he already suspects: that he’s created a monster, a monster to whom America is a joke, a punchline, something to be devoured and consumed, like a can of Diet Coke, a blond model or a bottle of pills, all things that Trump consumes ravenously over the course of the film.
Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” written by political reporter and Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman, is a portrait of the former president as a young man. Stan delivers the performance of his career to date, embodying Trump from the early 1970s to the 1990s. The plot concerns Trump’s learning at the feet of Cohn, the powerful political fixer known for his work with anticommunist Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), someone who brags of sending the Rosenbergs to the electric chair.
Abbasi opens the film with punk-rock flair, with young Donald, his Redford-inspired coif whipping in the wind, hitting the streets of Manhattan, mooning over the rundown Commodore Hotel, making his way inside the dark, luxe interior of the private Le Club. There, Cohn will send over one of his boy toys to invite Donald to dine with him at his table with his coterie of gangster clients. Donald is a striver, looking to please his cruel father, Fred (Martin Donovan), and he hopes that with Roy on his side, they’ll defeat a housing discrimination lawsuit brought against the Trumps by the Department of Justice.
It’s through this lawsuit that Cohn imparts the three rules that Trump has since lived — and ruled— by. One: Attack, attack, attack. Two: Admit nothing, deny everything. Three: Always claim victory, never admit defeat. As Cohn lays out these lessons, and as Trump parrots them years later during the ghost-writing of his book “The Art of the Deal,” it’s almost sickening to reflect on how we’ve seen these precepts play out in the governing of the United States of America.
This is the method by which Abbasi and Sherman go about making their argument about Trump. They lay it all out for the audience to see but don’t spell out the message that we’re meant to take away from it all — that would put too fine a point on it. We can plainly see Trump’s narcissism and psychopathy grow more malignant as the film progresses. The naïf we meet in the beginning becomes something far more terrifying as he is empowered by his success, hopped up on janky diet pills, following rules imparted to him by his impossibly complicated father figure, Cohn.
Both the movie's style and the performances evolve to capture the eras we traverse. Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen uses different film formats, with grainy Super 16mm (and European disco hits) of the ’70s giving way to the camcorder and VHS images from news cameras in the ’80s, reflecting the environments in which the media-obsessed Trump exists. The rich, dim interiors of Cohn’s cloistered world give way to the gaudy, golden posturing of Trump’s living spaces.
Stan and Strong’s astonishing performances also deepen and develop over the course of the film. Initially, Stan imparts only a small flavor of the familiar Trump flair; as his Trump ages, his delivery becomes more pronounced, his accent and cadence informed by both Fred and Roy. Strong is transformed as Cohn: slack-jawed and dead-eyed but constantly in motion, propelling his lithe, tanned body forward with a driven intensity in business and in pleasure. His dawning horror toward the end of the movie is startling only because we realize that Roy might actually have some kind of conscience, his shark-like appetite for power eclipsed only by his student’s.
Some may want “The Apprentice” to go further. It does humanize Trump. But it also presents a plainly obvious depiction of how a man can turn into a monster with the right personality, background and guidance. What more could it possibly need to say?
Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .
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