New Delhi:
The man who has made it a habit to hog the headlines on a daily basis did not emerge in a day. It took a tough-as-nails mentor and several years of work – fair, foul and fervid – before the Donald Trump the world knows today earned his stripes. The Apprentice, written by Gabriel Sherman and directed by Ali Abbasi, shows what went into the process.
The Apprentice is a nimbly crafted, sharp-witted account of the early real-estate business career of the future US President (played with stunning panache by Sebastian Stan) and his relationship with political hustler and hawk-eyed attorney Roy Cohn (brought alive by a remarkably impactful Jeremy Strong).
The title is a nod to the reality television show that the man who was to become the 45th POTUS co-produced and hosted (for the first 14 seasons), but the film goes further back in time to probe the creation of the credo that powers Trump and his supporters.
For Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker critically acclaimed for his first three films (Shelley, Border and Holy Spider), The Apprentice is a marked departure in terms of scene, substance and style. The film has an undisguised political slant, which is bound to nettle the man it is about, but it is a lively story told with the kind of flair that befits the subject.
A linear period biopic that begins with Trump’s first meeting with Cohn and ends with a scene in which the thriving real-estate tycoon contemplates becoming President, Abbasi’s fourth directorial venture thrives on keeping things simple and, at times, a touch superficial.
The Apprentice is an international co-production that involves Canada, Denmark, Ireland and the US. It isn’t the kind of film that looks for deceptive tangentiality. It is what it is – the tale of a real-life personage that takes a few liberties to heighten the drama inherent in a man’s relentless, self-assigned quest for “greatness” for himself and his country.
The Apprentice tracks the signposts of Trump’s formative phase as a tycoon whose life and business are shaped by Cohn in ways that continue to manifest themselves to this day in Trump’s conduct in the political arena.
In the opening moments of the film, when Trump is introduced to Cohn at a high-end New York restaurant, he is wrestling with a choppy relationship with his father, Fred Trump Sr (Martin Donovan), and is up against a real threat from a federal government investigation of their company under the Fair Housing Act for discrimination against Black tenants.
Donald complains to Cohn. The latter offers to help. A bond is quickly cemented as Cohn demonstrates to him first-hand the art of political arm-twisting and blackmail as tools for swinging favourable deals and bulldozing one’s way through hurdles erected by rules and morals.
Trump is an exceptionally quick learner. Cohn tells him that there are three rules that he must never forget – attack, attack and attack. Admit nothing, deny everything and claim victory (no matter what the outcome of a skirmish is) – that is the mantra that Cohn drills into Trump, a man he describes as “a 24-carat American patriot” and, therefore, worth rooting for.
Sherman’s script abounds in many such pearls of “wisdom” that Cohn is believed to have helped Trump imbibe until, of course, as with all of his early relationships, including the one with Czech model-turned-wife Ivana (played by Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova), the mentor equation began to sour and the two men drifted apart.
Truth is a malleable thing – that is one of the lines we hear in the course of the Trump-Cohn exchanges. So, everything that Cohn says and Trump cavalierly puts into practice is a push into territory shrouded in ethical ambiguity. “You must be willing to do anything to anyone,” Roy says to Trump.
The reason why the two men unquestioningly believe in that dictum is rooted in the role that they arrogate to themselves. “We are the last line of defence between the free world and a totalitarian hellscape,” says Cohn. Could there be a statement steeped in as much irony? The “anything” that Cohn exhorts Trump to do to “anyone” comes back to bite him before long.
The war between the free world and an authoritarian realm in which wielders of authority and influence think of the pursuit of power and pelf as an absolute necessity for survival and progress – “Killer means winner,” Trump says to his wife in one scene – is what Abbasi trains the spotlight on.
He never loses sight of the lingering linkages between what transpired back then and what is going on 40-odd years later. The directorial style that Abbasi adopts shuns over-explication (although the defining sequences are written expansively enough).
He instead follows a clear pattern that hinges on each inflection in the narrative representing a key point in the Donald Trump story. In the process of driving home the traits that make the public figure what he is in his private space and beyond, the film palpably humanises the man many of us love to hate.
The portrait that we are left with in the end is meant to be unflattering: an unapologetically brash, ambitious deal-maker who thinks nothing of playing fast and loose with regulatory mechanisms that get in the way of his aggrandisement plans. His “art of the deal” – that is the title he chooses for his ghostwritten autobiography – is a mix of daring and deception.
Sebastian Stan’s interpretation of the psyche of a man who defies his family, his associates and his adversaries at will, gives the film the glue that it needs to remain in one piece as it inevitably veers into tricky terrain at crucial junctures.
But the strongest performance in The Apprentice is from Jeremy Strong, who plays the cold, clinical, calculating Roy Cohn with spellbinding magnetism and conviction.
Donald Trump has, unsurprisingly, called The Apprentice a “pile of garbage” and a “cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job”. But as a member of the audience in “the free world” that Cohn claimed to represent, feel free to go and watch The Apprentice.
It is provocative and entertaining in equal measure. It makes its point with all the force it can muster. Should you buy it? Watch the film and decide for yourself. Rest assured that the two hours you devote to The Apprentice will not come to nought. It will give you much to mull over, one way or the other.