Forerunners And Frankensteins In 70s & 80s Gotham

“The Apprentice” Is A Clever Slow-Burn Character Drama As Real Horror

FILM REVIEW: “The Apprentice”

By Omar Moore
October 11, 2024

In a film of parallels the 1973 start of Ali Abbasi’s solemn character biopic “The Apprentice” sees a televised, defiant president Richard Nixon declare “I’m not a crook…I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” Almost simultaneously a solitary figure, Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), skulks the nighttime Manhattan streets. A giant rat of a nobody, Trump is later eyed by mob lawyer and notoriously amoral fixer Roy Cohn (an excellent Jeremy Strong) in a club at a table lined by a Last Supper of Bad Guys. The scene is dark and grainy, made intimate and confining by Super 16mm cameras intentionally lending a television feel to someone we are too familiar with, that certain NBC TV series be damned. This film’s terrain is nuance, which makes its events more palpable and troubling. When Cohn says America is a country of men not laws, we know he’s telling the unsettling truth — which is why governments provide guardrails against the human id and our basest instincts to prevent anarchy and criminal mayhem. Sometimes governments succeed in such prevention, sometimes they don’t. Exhibit A: Trump’s 40-year-tax abatement for Trump Tower at the expense of New York’s poor people, delivered on a platter by then-1970s NYC Mayor Abe Beame (or delivered by Cohn?)

For real: In a photo from the 1980s then bitter rivals New York City mayor Ed Koch and Donald Trump, with Ivana Trump. (Getty)

Mr. Abassi, who fictionalizes some of the proceedings, isn’t saying Nixon and Trump are alike (Cohn and Trump are alike) — he contrasts them on a well-worn “…and the American Way” landscape of corruption and lawlessness. The key word is “way” — the way (or method in which) Nixon committed his crimes versus the way Trump, a silver-spooner from Flushing, Queens, forayed into his. Having begged in a bathroom to be Cohn’s client (the homoeroticism isn’t lost in the scene) to fight a racial discrimination housing suit by the Justice Department, Trump is soon in Cohn’s office (orifice?) On a wall are photos of Cohn with 1950’s “Red Scare” Republican U.S. senator Joe McCarthy (whom Cohn represented), and with Nixon. These power brokers were shady and criminal, and “The Apprentice”, chronicling the rise of Trump in his 70s and 80s New York City days, shows birds of a feather flocking together. Some of these dirty birds have a conscience, others don’t. The foreshadowing of 2016 and today is inescapable but the engineering and operative mechanics of Trump are only possible in a city and country where crime absolutely pays and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Trump, whom Mr. Stan shades so dexterously, is accurately portrayed as a charming man utterly devoid of character, empathy and morals. The actor’s investment and its results are so casual and chilling. (And that’s without including the $85,000 May 1, 1989 Trump ad calling for the death penalty for five innocent Black and Latino boys, the now-Exonerated Five.)

So-called ingenious types exist in the annals of New York crime and corruption (Boss Tweed), as do imitators and knock-offs who flatter to deceive (Trump). Tweed is never mentioned but the gulf between them underlines the illustrative approach of “The Apprentice” in exhibiting the criminally crude and creative (Cohn, for example, is both). “The Apprentice” is a film where a Frankenstein is made by the pathological Cohn and surprise, horrors ensue. (One scene shows a Frankenstein-like surgical process. Is this film happening in Trump’s head?) Before long Cohn’s three rules of treachery are spelled out to his flaxen-haired young protege: attack, attack, attack; deny everything; always declare victory. These rules are an anthem that apparently embolden and inspire an awkward 34-year-old Queens lad to be a power-hungry narcissist and real estate sociopath. You expect something deeper to push forth this one-man assault on New York City and its politicos but Gabriel Sherman’s script eludes such inquiry. Quicker than you can say “twice-impeached” Trump is telling an associate of his soon-to-be-bankrupted Atlantic City casino “we’re gonna fleece this place”. We don’t learn what a remarkably dim and generally emotionally inaccessible Trump believes in before his rise to prominence and infamy — a blank slate is what we get. There’s no discernible value system in either Trump or Cohn, two kindred lovers in a crooked love story of tutelage, manipulation, criminality, money, power, lies and winning. Which is the point.

“The Apprentice” then, is a continuum and a warning, not a 34-count felony indictment of its central figure. It is more documentary than feature film, which means there’s less distance between you and its amoral figure. If any examination is gleaned it is in the question: where does power end and impulse and destruction begin — and which men with immense power ever stop short of eroding part or all of their soul? (Some do, but not here.) As Trump discards his troubled older brother Freddy, manipulates politicians and rapes his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) in an ugly, uncomfortable 15 seconds-long scene (much of which is put in our laps in close-up), a once-teetotaler is monster, one the film dispassionately depicts. As Cohn’s grip loosens on an ascending Trump — a surrogate father-son relationship that Trump’s father Fred (Martin Donovan), stripped of his Klan allegiance here, envies and despises — Trump’s id and psychopathy reigns and repulses. Mr. Abbasi’s careful, clever film shows that either anything goes or is eviscerated: women (potential competitors to Trump or not), any objective truth, rules, family, loyalty. When the vulnerability of Cohn (made empathetic by Mr. Strong) emerges, Trump’s ruthlessness has kicked into full gear. Some of what is shown is so heinous, vile (the aforementioned rape scene) and in-your-face that I felt complicit, even though I already knew and lived through all the events the film presents and I’ve never seen the TV series of this film’s same title, nor ever liked anything with the name “Trump” in it.

Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump and Martin Donovan as Fred Trump in Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice”. (Briarcliff Entertainment)

This slow-burn, frog-in-boiling water experience, which varies its look from the Super 16mm 70s aesthetic to the lurid VHS feel of the 1980s and stark-hot brightness of the 1990s could have been outlandish and theatrical but the director wisely avoids trivializing the mood and earnestness of a film whose two hours flies by. “The Apprentice”, which displays a muted, sad, dreary opulence and surface (“I don’t care about any deep bullshit”, Trump says to a biographer), has no “self-made” men, only self-destroyers. Appetites for destruction are even more chilling when enablers of those appetites (media, cultists, the public and politicians), kept largely at the film’s outer edges — are Trump’s cheerleaders.

These outer edges are the most important aspect of “The Apprentice”, a saturatingly detailed, on-target and serious exercise aside from its occasional comedic nods or half-winks at satire (“your face is like an orange”, Ivana taunts.) Neither Cohn nor his creation came from “nowhere”. They are two members of a centuries-long fraternity of white male criminals. Mr. Abbasi offers flashes of other 1980s New York criminal contemporaries like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky as signposts. Former Big Apple Mayor Ed Koch, depicted in the film as a real-life chief adversary of Trump, had numerous 1980s scandals like the Parking Violations Bureau nightmare (Donald Manes and co), detailed so well by Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett in the book “City For Sale”. The infamous, powerful and racist New York urban planner Robert Moses is a better comparison than Tricky Dick Nixon — who really did earn his way to the top and paid his dues — for Donald Trump’s emergence in New York real estate and power circles. Moses however, wielded much more power and influence over New York City, its mayor Robert Wagner, New York State and its politicians than the young Trump ever did.

As roguish and dangerous as Robert Moses was (he died just at the time Trump rose to prominence), his way to the top of power, having never been elected, was through intelligence and accomplishments. He knew how to wield power to get politicians to bend to his will. (The terrific 1,230-plus-page tome “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro details this and much more.) Donald Trump, as “The Apprentice” reveals so succinctly and tragically, is in way over his head, drowned by his own arrogance, ignorance, privilege, narcissism, lies and psychopathy to even care. He’ll keep riding after the wheels come off. Trump’s ways to crime (and to try to ban this film) won’t last nearly as long in morality circles perhaps(?) as Nixon’s awareness of when to say when, which is one reason why Trump’s fall will be way more precipitous and damning than Mr. Abbasi’s excellent film will ever be.

Running time: two hours. Rated R by the Motion Picture Association. Language, sexual content, nudity, anti-gay slurs, brief violence (including a rape scene).

FYI: This review originally appeared on Medium.