The Apprentice: The Making of a Monster

Donald Trump and his ethically bereft fanboys did everything in their obscenely scurrilous power to make sure you and I never enjoy this movie.

by Rich Herschlag

I would normally spot a few points to any movie claiming to be set in New York City in the 70s and 80s because I was there, albeit mostly as a kid, and absorbed it into my very DNA. But The Apprentice—the biopic Donald Trump and his lowly lackeys fought to not let you see—met and exceeded my wildest and most politically bloodthirsty expectations.

In a venture like this one there is extreme risk of over-New Yawking it—depicting endless street crime and grime, exaggerating the city’s brokenness, stereotyping its healthy variety of ethnicities (Yo, Vinny!!), and generally parodying its distinct accents. Riskier still for a film such as this one is the temptation to depict young Donald Trump as both a prodigy monster and a youthful caricature of his present self, perhaps even greater than 45’s own eventual temptation to call Brad Raffensperger looking for an extra 11,780 votes.

Startlingly, The Apprentice is guilty of none of that. Sebastian Stan’s twenty-something to fortyish Donald is even a sympathetic character at times. There, I said it. If we knew nothing of later attempts to rationalize Nazism, molest women, and overthrow the government of the United States of America, we might even have shed half a tear for the young Trump as he went knocking door to door collecting rent money inside his father’s Trump Village housing development in Brooklyn. If the well-dressed, reasonably polite son of a boss deserved to get cursed at, spat on, and have doors slammed in his face, it wasn’t yet clear why other than that, yeah, folks don’t like to pay rent and this dude’s dad was a jerk.

Years later when this same handsome, dapper fellow—shedding various forms of moral virginity with each passing scene—watches mentor Roy Cohn blackmail a DOJ prosecutor using photos suggesting his homosexuality—young Donald in the following scene points out almost reflexively that the tactic was . . . wait for it . . . illegal. The acting, both from Stan and Jeremy Strong‘s deadpan sinister Roy Cohn, is immaculate. They are low key amoral, one 30 years farther down the road to perdition than the other. The question, however, is this—was this display of vestigial redeeming qualities from the monster-in-training true to life or simply device? The Apprentice is so damn good it hardly matters.

My guess, however, is a bit of both. That Donald Trump’s evolution into a reckless wrecker of lives is gradual certainly makes for a more palatable story, and knowing what we know about the tabula rasa of the human soul, this is a plausible premise. Even my own handful of interactions with Donald Trump during my time as Manhattan Borough Engineer—a few years beyond the time period of The Apprentice—suggested there were still back in the day a few functioning anterior insular cortex cells left in the young shark’s brain.

We’ve all watched America decline slowly—though more rapidly as of late—and the unspoken truth of this bold movie is that its main character personifies that decline. There is cause and there is effect, and here it’s a genuine two-way street. Together, Stan and Strong, Trump and Cohn, are put on the planet to ruin whatever redeeming qualities it still has in the 70s and beyond, and never miss a beat of parasitism. Their repartee forms the game plan for the downfall of the USA in the 21^st century, and they pull it off quite casually riding around in yellow New York taxis in 1976.

But this is, after all, still the silver screen or something like it, and there has to be a turning point into the chasm, maybe even a few. If forced by a MAGA phoned-in death threat to pick one such turning point I’d say it’s the death of Donald’s older brother, Freddie Jr. True to life, Freddie battles both alcoholism and paternal sadism and loses. While the still-faintly-tethered-to-a-conscience Donald throws his beleaguered brother a hug here and a few dollars there, narcissistic critical mass is attained when Donnie finally turns away a desperate, nearly homeless Freddie from a night of potential peace in his successful younger brother’s luxury Upper East Side condo. The reason? While it could be some sort of tough love or subliminal advocacy of their father’s stringent values, we are led to believe by Donald’s hygienic proclivities it is really a matter of something much simpler and less Freudian than any of that—Freddie smelled bad.

Lurking just up the duplex stairs as this ugly metamorphosis unfolds is Ivana. Maria Bakalova as Trump’s first wife is as much of a moral anchor as an immoral human being can be. She’s aware of her deal with the devil but apparently did not anticipate her American husband would ultimately make the devil look good by comparison. The controversial rape scene belongs in the movie. It’s contextually if not factually accurate (we’ll never know for sure), but with all the smoke in Donald Trump’s history it is beyond plausible to accept there was fire. The sheer brutality of this humanly devolved man should not be and was not ignored in The Apprentice. Nor were Donald’s tears shortly following his brother Freddie’s death just shy of age 43. The tears are not forced. Rather, they are forced back into Donald Trump’s tear ducts, and we get the idea they are the very last tears he will shed until decades later when Brad Raffensperger turns him down.

Sebastian Stan gets the early Trump mannerisms, speech patterns, and body language without ever hinting at overreach. It’s an artistic impression that never settles for mimicry or lampooning. It’s chilling at times. Stan has been nominated for an Oscar for best actor and, along with Jeremy Strong’s nomination for best supporting actor, is the sole reason I will briefly pause from riffing on my bass guitar on the evening of March 2 to watch what is otherwise a yearly circle jerk put on by dinosaurs largely replaced by people’s iPhones stirring up drama at the family barbeque. I don’t know if Stan and Strong are method actors, but their work suggests it. I can imagine Stan postproduction taking months to clear the Trump toxins from his system. Or like the thespian virtuoso James Gandolfini never quite living down the role, or in this case the stench.

At its deepest apolitical level, The Apprentice is about the crude and tragic Cohn-Trump substitute for a father-son relationship. But The Apprentice doesn’t get sentimental about it for a microsecond. Whenever it potentially veers in that direction, some awfully appropriate cinematic device takes corrective action. Spoiler alert—the close shots of Trump’s gory scalp reduction procedure are almost as unseemly as the Cohn-Trump M.O., and that is no accident. As a metaphor for Trump’s shrinking soul it’s a homerun.

I haven’t cheated by reading his bio, but I’m guessing director Ali Abbasi spent a sizeable portion part of his life watching and analyzing films by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma. There are brief musical and scenic homages to both The Godfather and Scarface. But here in the 2020s any lingering romanticizing about the Don is stripped away like cash on hand at a bankrupt casino. There is no Citizen Kane allusion with the equivalent of “Rosebud” uttered wistfully at the end. The end is Ivana buried on a golf course, the Capitol building assaulted with Tasers and bear spray, Zelenskyy sold down the toilet, and the United States rendered a banana republic. You don’t see it in The Apprentice, but you know it’s coming.

Win or lose on Oscars night, it cannot be overstated that the nearly fatal one-two punch of frivolous vainglorious Trump lawsuits and venal 21^st century corporate interests kept this masterpiece—which received a spontaneous eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes—largely out of theaters and off of major streaming platforms during the very same months MAGA fully reemerged as the utter scourge of the earth. Donald Trump and his ethically bereft fanboys did everything in their obscenely scurrilous power to make sure you and I never enjoy this movie. And that, in this age of brimming fascism, is the highest honor of all.

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