In 2002, Donald Trump told Errol Morris that his favorite movie was Orson Welles’s 1941 classic Citizen Kane—an opinion that aligns surprisingly well with critical consensus. During the interview, Trump spoke candidly about Kane’s allegory of avarice and ambition, and where its story of a man trying to bend the world to his will intersected with his own legacy. He even offered a bit of passable formal analysis when discussing the famous sequence in which the protagonist’s self-imposed stint in domestic purgatory is visualized in a montage set entirely in his dining room. “The table getting larger, and larger, and larger, with [Kane] and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier … perhaps I can understand that,” Trump said. “I think you learn in [Citizen] Kane that maybe wealth isn’t everything. Because he had the wealth, but he didn’t have the happiness.”
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The sinister relationship between extreme wealth and extreme depression, and how the latter can metastasize into an all-obliterating megalomania, is an enduring American theme, and it’s at the heart—such as it is—of Ali Abbasi’s new Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice. The film, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes, has already incited predictable ire (and threats of litigation) on behalf of its namesake, as well as complaints from one of its own financiers pertaining to its content: When former Washington Commanders owner (and Trump donor) Dan Snyder saw a rough cut, he reportedly walked out of the screening room. For a while, the media narrative was that no U.S. distributor would touch The Apprentice because the material was just too dangerous; in June, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg speculated that it would be suppressed for political reasons. Such well-publicized anxieties are usually just another form of hype, however, and the film is being released this week as a potential Oscar contender, as well as an election-season intervention against its antihero and his latest bid for the White House. The cinematic equivalent of an October surprise.
That most of the revelations in The Apprentice are already a matter of public record is beside the point. Scripted by Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman—a journalist making his screenwriting debut—the film has been styled, aggressively and unapologetically, as a tactically unflattering portrait-of-the-mogul-as-a-young-man. Instead of a full life-and-times epic, we get a carefully curated series of snapshots, set in the 1970s and ’80s against the backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying but spiritually dilapidated New York City, whose downtown core is seemingly ready and willing to be rebranded by a real estate mogul with the will to put his name on anything above street level. Enter the 27-year-old Donald Trump, who, as played by Sebastian Stan, is savvy and charismatic but also doughy and unformed. The narrative through line is his molding into a killer at the hands of the legendary lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Imagine Pygmalion with a literally porcine protégé. “You create your own reality,” Cohn tells his new client. “Truth is a malleable thing.”
The incalculable wreckage left in the wake of Cohn’s life and career—and the tragic, seismic schadenfreude of a virulent public homophobe succumbing to AIDS behind the doors of his own lavishly appointed private closet—was already dramatized by Tony Kushner in his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America, which inventoried the self-styled Cold Warrior’s résumé as one of the masterminds behind McCarthyism, as well as a principal bogeyman in the Lavender Scare. That Sherman has brazenly borrowed his own script’s mentor-student dynamic—as well as the desolate poignancy of Cohn becoming a piece of collateral damage in his own scorched-earth prejudice—from Angels in America is perhaps fair enough: One of the functions of great works is to inspire variations.
It’s also fair enough to think that, after providing decades of fodder for irony-mongers like Spy magazine and Saturday Night Live, a figure as monolithic as Trump warrants his own pop-Mephistophelean origin story à la Citizen Kane—a movie sufficiently weaponized to take the once (and future?) president down to size. But when Welles took on the right-wing newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, he had plenty of stylistic ammunition. Welles was one of the greatest film artists who ever lived—a prodigy with the skill to make every mock-heroic close-up and muscle-flexing tracking shot count. When he showed the title character (played with bristling charisma by the director himself) refracted in a hall of mirrors, the image crystallized the concept of a man who contained multitudes while also being profoundly ordinary. It wasn’t just Charles Foster Kane that Welles had in his sights, but a culture where the ability to reproduce and project identity into infinity could potentially make demagogues of us all.
That Ali Abbasi isn’t Orson Welles is, once again, fair enough. But after watching the ugly misfire of The Apprentice—a movie as slovenly and obvious as Citizen Kane is sophisticated and spacious, and which makes even the 2016 Funny or Die short “The Art of the Deal” look like, well, Citizen Kane—the question remains: How the fuck do you miss a target as wide as Donald Trump?
There are few things more depressing than a cheap-shot artist who thinks he’s a marksman, which was the main takeaway from Abbasi’s previous feature, Holy Spider, a fact-based account of a serial killer preying on Iranian sex workers that trafficked in morbid sensationalism while cloaking itself in the vestments of moralizing social commentary. The opening scenes of The Apprentice, meanwhile, suggest a filmmaker aiming squarely below the belt in both senses of the word: When Donald locks eyes with Roy across a crowded dining room at Le Club, it’s framed as a diabolical meet-cute between a pair of anti-soul-mates, each in love with the archetypal idea of the other. It would be one thing if Abbasi showed the ability—or even the desire—to get inside the mix of self-infatuation and self-loathing driving this incarnation of Trump, but the best he can do is compel us to gawk at the people on-screen with cozily vicarious disapproval, secure in the knowledge that they exist across some vast chasm of history and experience. By clearly demarcating the line between their characters and the audience, Abbasi and Sherman sidestep the demands of genuine art, or even the honest vulgarity of a director like Paul Verhoeven, whose RoboCop burlesqued the cutthroat misanthropy (and unscrupulously privatized skylines) of the Reagan ’80s in real time without any pretenses to awards-season prestige.
It may be that Sebastian Stan will find himself nominated for Best Actor early next year; hopefully it will be for his superlative work in Aaron Schimberg’s surreal comedy A Different Man, which channels the rage and alienation of a loner trapped in his own skin—and also the concept of New York as an emotionally parched hellscape—with exponentially more poetry and humor than The Apprentice. It’s not that Stan is bad, exactly. He plays the role as written, which is to say that he’s allowed to be (relatively) subtle in the first half of the narrative before swapping out any sense of naturalism for a collection of recognizable verbal and physical tics in the second. In theory, the performance is shaped around the idea that the version of Trump that’s come to dominate the public consciousness was gradually willed into being as a hybrid form of behavioral modification and performance art. But because Abbasi can’t abide anything like contradiction or complexity, the process doesn’t so much deepen the characterization as flatten it, stranding a gifted and resourceful performer in the no-man’s-land of sketch-comedy impersonation.
As for Strong, whose casting is shadowed by Al Pacino’s phenomenal portrayal of Cohn in the TV adaptation of Angels in America (as well as his role on Succession), he’s reached the point—endemic to being a certain kind of great actor—where the nobility of his commitment to the bit is, paradoxically, what keeps him from actually nailing it. The most extraordinary aspect of Strong’s presence on Succession was how he managed to convey how a person as emotionally fragile and psychologically transparent as Kendall Roy could still be a mystery to himself and the people around him. Whether trying to live up to his best ideas or succumbing to his worst impulses, you could register the wires crossing behind the character’s eyes. The impression was of an actor building a character from the ground up as well as the inside out, and capturing something true about the multiplicity of privileged pseudo-visionaries hovering above us: that their lack of conviction gives them an ethical permission slip to support the most noxious causes imaginable (remember that Kendall’s flight jacket get-up while pitching “Living+” was based on Elon Musk). The difference with Roy Cohn, of course, is that he was a rabid, unrepentant ideologue—closer in spirit, if not self-presentation, to Logan Roy—and the only thing Strong can do with his interpretation of the role is clobber it (and us) so that every scene feels like he’s working a speed bag—a show of exertion that only intermittently syncs with Cohn’s own notorious showmanship.
Beyond Stan and Strong’s strained double act, The Apprentice doesn’t have much going on at the margins; the ostensible emotional impact of the scenes depicting Donald’s courtship of, and progressively dysfunctional marriage to, the late Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova) is undermined by the same faux-austere grandstanding that marred the putative anti-misogyny of Holy Spider. Abbasi and Sherman clearly care less about what happened to Ivana than the fact that depicting incidents of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse helps them cinch what’s already an open-and-shut case against her husband. That same attitude pervades the film’s presentation of the social, cultural, and political realities surrounding Trump’s rise to power, which resorts to the laziest kind of shorthand—i.e., a brief cutaway to an irate Black man decrying Trump’s racist attitudes after a group of compromised city planners grant the latter rights to refurbish the Commodore Hotel—instead of trying to work through the attitudes that made such predatory, discriminatory practices possible. Instead of contextualizing Trump and Cohn’s relationship in the larger context of a nationwide swing to the right, The Apprentice simply inventories their monstrous actions (and appetites) while feigning clear-eyed impartiality. It’s one thing to craft a fable about bad men insulating themselves from the consequences of their actions beneath impenetrably stratified layers of wealth; it’s another to make a movie that feels trapped in a similarly hollow sort of echo chamber, saying the same basic thing over and over again until the volume and the redundancy become integrated on a molecular level.
Near the climax of the film, Abbasi gives us the hypothetically potent spectacle of Stan lying supine and unconscious on an operating table during a nip-and-tuck—a clinical yet grotesque image that’s supposed to be the movie’s trump card. It is, indeed, a perfect visual metaphor. But only because it confirms The Apprentice as a purely cosmetic exercise, slicing away futilely at Donald Trump while ultimately confirming his indestructibility.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
