THE APPRENTICE takes as its focus the relationship between Roy Cohn and the young and hungry Donald Trump of the 1970s. This would be the callow Trump who was stifled by the long shadow cast by his father, Fred (Martin Donovan), and the utter cluelessness about how to play an all too easily rigged system to his advantage. Though specific in how Cohn re-created Trump in his own image, the film is about a system that can give rise to both Cohn and to Trump, and in this it casts a dark image of the United States to which both men gave unalloyed allegiance. The most troubling consequence of which is the inevitability of where we find ourselves today in light of such political antecedents.
Much has been written about the Cohn-Trump relationship, but to see it played out in such excruciating detail is to be taken aback by the cynicism involved and the ease in which it operates. Trump, subjected to bullying and abuse by both his father and the tenants from which he collects the rent on his father’s low-end apartments in Queens, desperately plays up to Cohn, the powerbroker who can help him crack the Manhattan real estate market. For the younger man, to be called into Cohn’s presence at an exclusive club is the break for which he has dreamed. For Cohn, spotting the young and pretty golden-haired Trump across a crowded club, has invited him over for reasons that become apparent when he lays an inappropriate hand on Donald, who does not react to either acquiesce or to reject. Trump understands that he is finally sitting, literally and metaphorically, at the seat of power, and will do nothing to lose that spot, no matter how unctuous he must be, no matter how opposed his father is to dealing with a lawyer boasting three indictments in his shady past. That a future president is made because of hormonal attraction, one-sided but distinct, sets the tone for all that is to come, a thesis all the more cringe-worthy as Trump turns Cohn into the father-figure for which he longs.
Ali Abbasi uses a cold precision when exposing how New York City politics are done such that you can almost smell the corruption, which makes for a fine microcosm of the world at large. If there is a soupcon of disapproval as Cohn explains the blackmail infrastructure that allows him to control the power brokers, it quickly fades in the blinding light of the success it will bring. This is a Trump who does not start out as the addled, rambling candidate with few vocabulary words at his disposal currently running for president. He is instead alert, if not overly savvy, ambitious and emotionally crippled as he longs for the American Dream as much as he does the approval of his controlling and dismissive father. When Cohn shows a glimmer of belief in Trump’s business acumen, Trump is a willing acolyte, foreshadowing, as so much of this film does, the way flattery will win him over no matter who is doing the flattering, and his weakness for strongmen of all stripes. When Cohn doesn’t just tell Trump the three rules of winning, but demonstrates them in all their vile glory, it isn’t so much the absolute evil at play that is the attraction, as the need to be accepted and admired that makes it palatable to the slavish acolyte. Right and wrong are meaningless constructs, as Cohn dispassionately explains. This is how we get to a lawyer who is convinced he is saving America by breaking its laws, and a capitalist who espouses fascism to Make America Great Again.
It is almost painful to watch the transformation from the eager, awkward young man who is capable of feeling into the dead-eyed reptile so beautifully captured by Jeremy Strong as Trump’s idol. The what-ifs litter the path Trump takes, and that Sebastian Stan portrays with such immediacy. We go from boyish innocence in his pursuit of acceptance by the Manhattan elite he envies, and by first wife, an equally ambitious and maybe much smarter Ivana (Maria Bakalova) who blows him off, to a man who hasn’t taken Cohn’s three rules for success to heart so much as internalized them into his very DNA. Attack. Deny. Claim victory. The gradual pursing of lips into a permanent caricature of an expression, the constant checking of mirrors to make sure his coif is just right even as it thins and becomes more and more absurd, becomes not the projection of power and confidence, but rather Trump’s pathetic attempt to con the world into believing that he is just that, and thereby reassure himself. It is the external manifestation of the vicious circle that twists his personality in the fruitless attempt to feed an ego that will never be sated.
It is equally disturbing to watch Cohn succeed in creating Trump in his own image. True, this is the man who was McCarthy’s attack dog, persecuting Americans for their politics in the 50s, and sending Ethel Rosenberg to the chair as a lesson to the liberals he considered the enemies of capitalism, but to see Trump’s callousness during Cohn’s final illness (he never admitted it was AIDS), is to see where America went wrong in its attitude to its most vulnerable, and the whirlwind of unchecked narcissism it engendered. That it smacks of a poetic judgment of biblical proportions doesn’t let us off the hook when it comes to the basic decency of compassion with which Cohn was untroubled. But when Trump rejects his older brother, Fred Jr., the alcoholic wreck engineered by his father’s thwarted expectations, it is a damning gloss on Trumpism from which there is no surcease nor absolution.
And this is where THE APPRENTICE is at its most caustic, its most prescient, and its most grotesquely fascinating. If the final montage of Trump using plastic surgery is a little heavy-handed about the importance of image over substance, it is the only flaw in its otherwise flawless depiction of the artifice, the smoke and mirrors, of politics, both personal and governmental. This is a landscape that is anathema to human feeling in its mad scramble to be a winner, not a loser in a savage zero-sum game. At least as defined by Cohn, Fred Sr, and Donald himself. Explanation and critique, THE APPRENTICE provides a lens through which we can view where we are and how we got there. Prepare to be disarmed and disquieted in equal measure.
Your Thoughts?