The Apprentice

It's difficult to make a narrative film about recent events. Without the distance of decades to understand its full consequences, your perspective is inherently limited. You can either explore the immediate repercussions, or simply capture what it was like to live through. There will be many revelations to come about what was happening behind the scenes, which is often more impactful than that to which we were privy. For every The Social Network, which somehow manages to stay relevant and insightful despite coming out only a few years after Facebook's founding, there's a Dumb Money or She Said or even Kim's Video, which never gave themselves the chance to do their subject matter justice.

Director Ali Abbasi pulls a trick employed by many before him to avoid such a pitfall: commenting on the present by looking to the past.

The seeds of the man Donald Trump would become were sowed long ago. The obsession with wealth and power and celebrity that would calcify into the wannabe authoritarian with whom we're still grappling. If you've spent any time learning how Trump became Trump, you've come across Roy Cohn. A lawyer by trade, he played an instrumental part in the conviction and death sentence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason in the 50s, aggressively interrogated suspected Communists as Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel, and aided in the re-election of Nixon in '72. All of this was well known at the time, meaning when Trump enlisted him to defend against the Fed's accusations of discrimination in his real-estate business in 1973, he knew full well who he was getting into bed with.

It's this relationship Abbasi wishes for us to consider: the cold, powerful, ruthless Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and the slouched, timid, ineloquent Trump (Sebastian Stan). Despite fetishizing fame and money so deeply that a dinner date at a fancy restaurant turns into him naming each of their fellow diners, Trump hasn't figured out how to pull the various levers of power to accomplish all he desires. Cohn senses this drive in him, the lack of scruples which enabled his own lavish lifestyle and reputation, and the hunger for more. And Cohn, always looking for someone to hitch his wagon to in order to elevate his own power and influence, sees an opportunity to mold Trump into someone in his own image over whom he has control.

The early years of their partnership contain the only real moments of Trump's humanity. He loves his family and respects his father Fred (Martin Donovan), desperately craving his approval. He shows some compassion for tenants who can't pay in full, and talks at great lengths to anyone who will listen about the vision he has for New York City. He shows signs of the arrogant narcissist he would soon become, but with no successes to call his own, it has no room to take root. He's ambitious but lost, making him all the more malleable.

This isn't a tragedy of a lost soul, though. By making it clear that Trump isn't a sociopath, Abbasi condemns Trump more strongly than if he began the movie fully formed. The bullying, the lying, the selfishness, the denial of reality: these are not symptoms of some greater ill, they are deliberate choices to accomplish his goals at any cost. He's an opportunist who divorced himself from his prior life and beliefs so he'd be unencumbered in his pursuit of wealth. And once he's obtained it, he hoards it jealously, afraid and angry that anyone would dare ask him for help. His brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick) isn't even deemed worthy of staying a night in the guest room in his time of need. There are moments we see the mask slip, and we get some indications that he may have a more nuanced inner life than we know. But that just makes it all the more chilling when he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and steels himself to continue bulldozing everything in his path, collateral damage be damned.

While it's exhausting to spend so much time witnessing so much monstrous, callous behavior, it's made intensely compelling by the sharp script and brilliant performances of both Strong and Stan. They play off each other wonderfully, forming a father-son bond that evolves over their thirteen years as friends, tracking with Trump's rise and Cohn's fall. Strong is a force of nature out of the gate, commanding every single second he's on screen, oozing a magnetism that allows you to inherently feel why people were drawn to Cohn, even as he's dropping racial slurs and trafficking in ugly stereotypes. You sense him feeling out Donald, and he wordlessly communicates why he takes an interest in the kid. Meanwhile, Stan plays Trump like a puppy dog eager for scraps, cautiously stepping down this aggressive path before a small success sends him on a full sprint. As we progress through the 80s, there's a subtle shift Stan brings to his interactions with Cohn which tells us of Trump's feelings toward him well before they become explicit. And in these moments, Cohn's lowest, Strong does a remarkable job of convincing us this attack dog feels betrayed by his protege. Somehow, despite Trump being the one who needed to be liked, it's Cohn who ends up feeling betrayed.

The way Abbasi visualizes this shift in dynamic is quite clever and subtle. Following a montage in which Trump starts stamping his name on everything, which we experience through a bunch of back-to-back snippets from TV appearances, the whole thing takes on the sheen of a TV show. Whenever Trump is on screen (which is most of the time), the shots contain aberrations, are overlit, and look slightly fuzzy, as if we're watching a cleaned up, low-resolution VHS; some shots even look smooth enough to be video. In fact, if you pay close attention, you can even see the scanlines running across the screen. All of which heightens the cheap, artificial feeling of Trump's sense of style, while mirroring the artifice of his personality and every single remaining relationship. The only shots from this point on which look normal are when we momentarily step away, for example to check in on Roy Cohn and his lover, reminding us that for all his flaws as a person and damage he's done to the world, he was always true to himself.

Despite being confidently dropped into the middle of a contentious election season, this is not a polemic. It explores its ideas incredibly competently and with great energy, but they're not anything new. Abbasi doesn't present a strong view on Trump's explicit politics, as they rarely come up explicitly. Rather, he wants to understand where this man came from, what made him tick before his sense of self was truly locked down, and how it all came apart. Abbasi absolutely takes a stance on Trump the person, though, showing (allegedly) real events which cast him in an appalling light, and demonstrating how he's bitten the hand of every person who's ever shown him the least bit of kindness. The upshot of which is that while there certainly was a human being in there at one time, Trump has very consciously stuffed every single one of those instincts down, unable to understand how hollow it is to pursue power for its own sake, until what's left is the empty shell we see before us.