Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on massive television.
I’m desperately behind on finishing up the Oscar movies from 2024, having five to knock out in the next 31 days if I’m going to get them all done by the end of the year. It’s more than I’d like, and I will admit that a part of this is that I’m dreading the length of The Brutalist and I’m not that interested in Anora. But of the films I need to finish, it’s The Apprentice that I have dreaded the most. The last thing I want to spend time with is watching some sort of attempt to reform the character of Donald Trump. I have no interest in offering him any sympathy.
This is a movie where the title is doing double duty. The Apprentice, of course, is the name of Trump’s old television show, and arguably the one that truly made him accessible to the masses, and more than anything paved the way to his misbegotten presidencies. The real meaning of the title, though, is that this is essentially the origin story of Trump (Sebastian Stan, who was Oscar nominated for this, and the reason I’m watching it), who was essentially taught to be the man he is by Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Essentially, Trump learned at the feet of Cohn, who is almost certainly in the top-5 of the most genuinely evil people from the 20th Century.
The truth of The Apprentice is that there isn’t a tremendous amount of plot in the film. It is very much a biopic of a young Donald Trump, from the beginnings of his relationship with Cohn through the time of Cohn’s death in the mid-1980s. At first, Trump is something of a naif, introduced into a world where power comes to those who take it. Much of the early part of the film consists of Cohn being Cohn and teaching Trump to attack first and apologize for nothing.
The film progresses through Trump’s various hotel deals, making a name for himself in the real estate world and eventually branching out into casinos in Atlantic City. It covers his first marriage to Ivana (Maria Bakalova), through their initial romance and up to the beginning of their falling out and divorce. The film concludes on the falling out between Trump and Cohn, Cohn’s contracting of AIDS, their reunion, and Cohn’s eventual death, perhaps realizing what he might have created in Trump, and the beginnings of Trump’s book.
Because there isn’t a lot of plot here, other things become important to the discussion. Primary in this is the performances. There are three central performances here that are noteworthy—the three actors mentioned above: Stan, Strong, and Bakalova. Sebastian Stan is the reason that I had to watch this for the blog, and he is disturbingly accurate in his portrayal. The mannerisms are all there—the gestures, the squinting, the pursed lips. Stan has long been a serviceable actor, but it’s been hard (at least for me) to see him as anything more than just that. He’s managed to capture Trump frighteningly well. There are moments (mostly early on, in that naif period) where he almost humanizes the man, but he never really does all the way. Stan manages to buy into the character enough to play him well, and that might well be the most impressive acting feat in the film.
Bakalova, who got her start with the first Borat film, continues to demonstrate that she is capable of what roles are put in front of her. While I haven’t seen all of her films, I can say I haven’t seen one where she didn’t shine, and she’s very good here. In fact, Ivana Trump is really the only person on screen who is at all sympathetic—it’s clear that she sees through Trump’s veneer pretty quickly, and what plays out on her face is less disgust and more resignation.
But it’s Jeremy Strong who sells the entire film as the loathsome Roy Cohn. Strong is an interesting actor and while he’s generally good, he seems to excel in this sort of role where he can be truly vile and self-centered. Interestingly, his most famous role is someone else named Roy, albeit as a surname, in Succession. Kendall Roy and Roy Cohn are similar in a lot of ways, with Cohn being a much more fully realized form of evil than Strong’s drug-addled narcissistic Kendall. Strong was rightly nominated for the role, and in a different year, would have won easily instead of losing to his Succession castmate.
The truth is that I don’t like this movie. I don’t know if anyone is going to actually “like” this movie. If you don’t like Trump, it’s hard to want to spend two hours with him. If you like Trump, you’re likely to feel the same way he does, and that this film is a hatchet job. Still, it did seem to get nominated for the awards it should have.
Why to watch The Apprentice: If you want to fight evil, you need to know where it came from.
Why not to watch: Do you really want to spend two hours even with a simulated Donald Trump?
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