The Apprentice: Ali Abbasi’s Trump origin story unveils a grotesque truth
The Iranian-Danish director returns with another grim tale — this time tracing a younger Donald Trump, whom he makes odious without becoming an inhuman caricature
–
I watched, and loved, almost every episode of The Celebrity Apprentice — it’s one of my greatest shames. Back then, it seemed a harmless bit of trashy fun, watching Joan Rivers and the lead singer of Poison win money for charity and raise their public profiles. It wouldn’t be until June 2015 that I really paid attention to the orange man with the weird hair, as he descended a golden escalator before accusing Mexico of sending “rapists” to the US, and announced his eventually successful bid to become US president.
It was only then that I learned about the dark foundation upon which Trump Tower was erected; Donald Trump’s bankruptcies, campaigns against mosques and Muslims, Mexican immigrants, the Central Park 5 and Black tenants in his buildings. Ali Abbasi’s new biopic The Apprentice, goes back even further into Trump’s story, to the 1970s when he begins his unlikely journey to the top of America’s echelon of power.
The film also comes from an unlikely source — the Iranian-Danish filmmaker has previously set his films closer to home, and is now venturing into the most American of stories. His first feature, Shelley, was a twisted but elegant horror about a Romanian surrogate to a Danish couple whose pregnancy becomes increasingly malevolent, marking Abbasi out as a European festival darling.
He followed it up with the magical realism fable Border, set in Sweden where a lonely border official slowly accepts her identity as a troll, which was awarded the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and went on to be Sweden’s entry to the Academy Awards. He would then return to Cannes for Holy Spider, its lead Zar Amir Ebrahimi winning best actress. The film, based on the true story of a serial killer in Mashhad, Iran who killed 16 women, divided audiences as many felt some scenes did not just depict misogyny, but engaged in it. While there’s an air of Islamophobia to such accusations, it’s an undeniably nihilistic piece of work, despite Amir Ebrahimi’s phenomenal performance.
So it was with an air of trepidation (and lingering Celebrity Apprentice guilt) that I watched The Apprentice. The film’s lead actors — Sebastian Stan as Trump and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as New York lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn— have proven they are capable of bringing raw humanity and complexity to their performances. But Cohn, a notorious and divisive figure, together with Trump, are not people that I am in desperate need to extend empathy towards.
Thankfully, despite my reservations, Abbasi’s film makes these men odious without turning them into inhuman caricatures. Strong has an easier task in many regards; as much as Cohn is infamous, there isn’t a culturally ubiquitous image of him that’s seemed to open every Saturday Night Live episode for the past decade. Stan skillfully walks the knife’s edge of weird hand gestures and distinctive cadence without falling into tangerine-hued Alec Baldwin.
Stan is playing an earlier version of the — and it’s still somehow shocking to type this — 45th and potentially 47th US president. When we meet him he’s a sleazy nepo baby who is desperate to gain his slum landlord father’s (Martin Donavan) approval. He finds a quasi-patriarch and mentor in Cohn who imparts wisdom with terrible contemporary prescience like, “Admit nothing, deny everything”, and “No matter what happens, never admit defeat”. It’s not subtle filmmaking (though nothing Abbasi has made has been associated with subtlety); there’s the Citizen Kane poster on his boardroom, his choice to have liposuction rather than attend his mentor’s funeral, and the way he treats his wife Ivana (the always excellent Maria Bakalova), going so far as to sexually assault her on their apartment floor.
What is most interesting is how Abbasi’s outsider perspective can be felt throughout. He has an almost detached morbid curiosity, poking at how these two men can fail upwards with schemes that largely amount to being dishonest. Abbasi’s approach is able to un-normalise what we’ve unfortunately become inured to when it comes to Trump’s actions and character. The director has claimed the movie is not particularly “anti-Trump” — this isn’t a film of spin, but one that unveils a truth that just happens to be grotesque.
Over the course of The Apprentice, Stan’s Trump gradually transforms into a closer resemblance with the man who recently claimed immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Ohio. And as maniacal, disloyal, and downright scuzzy as Trump and Cohn are shown to be on screen by Abbasi, the film still lands as an origin story. And as we all know, things only got worse.
The Apprentice is in UK and Irish cinemas from 18 October.
Topics
Get the Hyphen weekly
Subscribe to Hyphen’s weekly round-up for insightful reportage, commentary and the latest arts and lifestyle coverage, from across the UK and Europe
This form may not be visible due to adblockers, or JavaScript not being enabled.