“You create your own reality. The truth is malleable,” Roy Cohn tells a young Donald Trump in the new movie “The Apprentice.”
It’s a lesson that the starry-eyed scion from Queens will take all the way to the White House.
The crude patriotism expressed by both Trump and Cohn may be self-serving, but it’s hard not to see it as preferable to the pessimistic inertia dragging this once great city down.
But it could also serve as a warning to anyone trying to make a film about Trump: The reality-distortion field surrounding our 45th president affects his critics no less than his fans.
Man, myth, monster
Trump is one of the most controversial human beings in contemporary history; a populist messiah or rage-fueled fascist, depending on who you ask.
It is almost impossible to portray him in a neutral or sympathetic light, to grapple with the humanity under the accumulated detritus of five decades of public life.
Past attempts, like Showtime’s “The Comey Rule” — a blatant piece of “resistance” propaganda uninterested in any coherent depiction of the Trump administration’s inner workings — don’t bother trying.
As a result, most film and TV versions of Trump barely rise above Alec Baldwin’s crude “Saturday Night Live” caricature, driven by partisan resentment and mesmerized by Trump’s often disagreeable public persona.
Trump in training
“The Apprentice” largely avoids this trap by approaching its subject indirectly. Instead of the fully-formed scourge of democracy, it gives us a portrait of the deal artist as a young man.
Set in the 1970s and 1980s, the film opens on boyish Donald Trump still struggling to break free from his boorish, domineering father and his modest, outer-borough real estate empire.
A company vice president whose duties include going door-to-door collecting overdue rent from disgruntled tenants, the young Trump dreams of turning the family business into something bigger but is hampered by a federal lawsuit alleging racist housing discrimination (a charge the movie suggests is true).
It isn’t until a chance meeting with infamous Joseph McCarthy prosecutor and political fixer Roy Cohn that Trump sees a way out from under his father’s shadow. Taking the aspiring mogul under his wing, Cohn guides him through the early stages of his career by teaching him the three cardinal rules of winning: attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat.
Sympathy for the Donald
Echoing themes from “Citizen Kane” and classic Greek tragedies, “The Apprentice” presents the rise of Trump as a cautionary tale; director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman are smart enough to understand that their protagonist needs a sympathetic core if his hollowing out is to be effective.
Superficially, the movie isn’t shy about its contempt toward the man and his influences. Family patriarch Fred Sr. is unabashedly racist, Cohn drops homophobic slurs and rambles about liberals and socialists stealing from great men, and one of Trump’s opening scenes is him as a landlord threatening to evict Section 8 renters overburdened by medical bills.
Trump himself is depicted as a venal adulterer who goes as far as to rape his wife (as Ivana Trump alleged and later backtracked on in her 1990 divorce deposition). The movie works overtime to earn its bleak conclusion, in which the student callously discards the master.
Surgical strike
“The Apprentice” emphasizes Trump’s ultimate dehumanization and moral degradation in the graphic, close-up shots of scalp-reduction surgery and liposuction (on a patient coyly suggested to be Trump) with which it ends. Evoking both Darth Vader and Dr. Frankenstein’s abomination, this clinical, creepy scene makes the movie’s subtext clear: We’ve just witnessed the creation of a monster.
Trump may be a monster, but he’s also very much a product of his environment. As “The Apprentice” takes care to establish, the New York City of this era is rotting, with even the iconic Chrysler building in foreclosure. The crude patriotism expressed by both Trump and Cohn may be self-serving, but it’s hard not to see it as preferable to the pessimistic inertia dragging this once great city down.
According to Abbasi, his goal was not to portray Trump as “a caricature or a crooked politician or a hero or whatever you might think, but as a human being.” As Politico puts it, he’s an anti-hero. “He’s tragic, not evil.”
High-rise Hamlet
Sebastian Stan brings this tragic note to his portrayal of Trump, especially in scenes with his alcoholic older brother, Freddy (a suitably dissolute Charlie Carrick), summoning a tenderness not often associated with the former president. Stan ably captures his subject’s more peculiar eccentricities, speech patterns, and mannerisms — even if the face of the Winter Soldier occasionally proves distracting.
This is a quality film, to use one of Trump’s favorite descriptors. But its nuance may well have hurt its commercial prospects. Despite being marketed as “the movie Donald Trump doesn’t want you to see” (bolstered by Trump’s threats to sue the filmmakers for “pure malicious defamation”), “The Apprentice” hasn’t done much business after a week in theaters.
Not much of an October surprise after all. But then, maybe it was too much to ask a well-crafted period piece like “The Apprentice” to compete with the riveting drama playing out before us in real time.
Trump isn’t one for dwelling on the past, and neither are those drawn to him, whether out of love or hate. Where’s he’s been has always been far less compelling than what he’ll do next.