The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

[tehthomas]

I had completely forgotten until watching the BBC interview with Al Pacino currently airing that Pacino played Roy Cohn back in Mike Nichols' TV series version of Angels in America.

The similarities between Scarface and Donald Trump continue.

I wrote about this on my blog back in 2020, I would like to think its aged well.

[Never Cursed]

While its litigious subject hardly helped matters, I don't think that the failure of The Apprentice to secure reasonable distribution (and indeed the unreasonable but ultimately successful distribution plan its eventual owners settled upon) requires an explanation more complex than an exasperated gesture at the masturbatory resist-lib tack it takes. I obviously hate Trump and do not mind an unkind depiction of him, but in spite of its slavish efforts to appear as though it is "explaining" or "understanding" or "digging into the soul" of the man, this movie is in every fashion made to validate the impressions of people with a settled and nauseatingly smug conception of Trump's origins. As a highlights tour of Trump's association with Roy Cohn (several moments of which are shamelessly stolen from Angels In America sans context) and his early career as a privileged property developer, it would be palatable if anemic and shallow, but the filmmakers simply cannot restrain themselves from getting their HORRENDOUS cheap shot and audience-referential laffs in, and they become the punchlines and points of many of the later scenes. This film wants to be many other, better filmed works about greed and ambition (Succession, Scarface, A Face in the Crowd), but it resembles closest the tiresome Adam McKay "satires" of the past decade in just how frequently a familiar Trumpian tic or anecdote or humiliating story is dangled in front of the audience with a "recognize this?" sign attached. Over and over again the audience is presented "that scene," the worst scene, in a biopic (and these are all real examples taken from the movie): Trump formulates and stumbles through his first "it's gonna be the greatest in the city, and in the country, and probably the whole world" saw, or where he starts drinking too much diet Coke and gets conscious about his hairline and weight, or where Roger Stone says "gee Donald, you sure would be a great president" before handing him a button that says "REAGAN: Let's Make America Great Again!" If it isn't that, it's of course lowest-common-denominator comedy where Trump doesn't recognize famous people because he's uncultured or can't keep an erection because he's thinking too hard about his big buildings or, oh no, accidentally walks in on Roy Cohn getting fucked in the ass! If there's anything that's always funny and embarrassing, it's definitely gay sex!

Spoiler

The nadir of this approach is of course the rape scene, where we first get to marvel at Sebastian Stan pretending not to know how to say "clitoris" before his wife says he's going bald, which is the insult that prompts him to rape her. The scene moves so quickly and the body language and points of discussion are so exaggerated that it almost approaches the tone of an Always Sunny finale. I swear you can almost hear "Grand Central" when Stan grabs Bakalova.

The film's approach is not only fundamentally not serious, it is as unregulated, pleasure-seeking, and id-driven as the man it depicts all while posturing as being above such behavior. Its cowardice in reducing the young Napoleon to a childish stuffed shirt reveals how little this ostensibly political film takes politics seriously (and by extension the many lives that Trump will ruin or seriously harm). It is as facile and charmless as those adult picture books lampooning the once and current president, but at least those books were made by resist-libs for resist-libs at the height of resist-libness during his first term. The most remarkable thing about The Apprentice, by contrast, is how stale it is, how much it is already past its expiration date.

[pianocrash]

Look, this is a biopic about Donald Trump. You might need to adjust your expectations of those two things going into this, as I, somewhat reluctantly did. Though I can't defend any of your argument on the whole, I never expected it to be enjoyable at all, god forbid a comedy (it really isn't, I don't think, though it has it's lighter duh-fer-laffs moments). In fact, as the film progresses, it's more than anything a horror picture, as the last scenario depicted is basically that, because how can it not be regarding the subject at hand?

Anyway, this was never going to be a great film, just as that Cheney picture wasn't, either. The Apprentice is closer to a movie-of-the-week, at best, and it's always about Strong & Stan. The source material is such that I'm not sure if it's possible for anything resembling an enjoyable time on any level is possible (lifting Roy Cohn dialogue from other sources seems not only appropriate for the subject at hand, but also for another extraordinary mouthpiece of a human being who loved attention and baited the press). What I'm saying is Cohn had enough material that even reporting his actual words could be seen as plagiarism in the right context, as his record of life on earth probably shows (respect to Kushner, et al). I don't believe the walk-in scene was played for laughs, but I live in the midwest? It was also tragic to not recognize Andy Warhol at a party, but I see what you might mean.

I did appreciate the degradation in quality of the photography as the film carried on (it's a horror picture!), but I suppose I veer on the side of enjoying the two leads making the most of the situation, overall, at best.

There is a moment wherein DT is in bed watching television with an unnamed blonde fling, and I couldn't make out what her t-shirt said. In a funnier picture, it probably read "I'm Marla Maples!", but maybe it did?

[Never Cursed]

(lifting Roy Cohn dialogue from other sources seems not only appropriate for the subject at hand, but also for another extraordinary mouthpiece of a human being who loved attention and baited the press). What I'm saying is Cohn had enough material that even reporting his actual words could be seen as plagiarism in the right context, as his record of life on earth probably shows (respect to Kushner, et al).

I get what you mean, but I more meant that Abbasi and Sherman ripped the function and utility of some stuff from Angels In America in addition to the words themselves (which were written by Tony Kushner and were NOT quotes from the real Cohn). Certainly the stuff about

Spoiler

his death

is very similar, but the most egregious example was the revelation that Cohn lobbied for the execution of Ethel Rosenberg as well as her husband. In both the Kushner play and this film, these are revelations placed at the mid-point of the piece to situation Cohn in a historical context and to explicitly show the consequences of his dirty tricks. It irritates me to see Sherman imitate Kushner's pattern and indeed his words because, without getting too into it, there's a lot more going on in Angels than in this film. Compare the following:

If it wasn’t for me, Joe, Ethel Rosenberg would be alive today, writing some personal-advice column for Ms. Magazine. She isn’t. Because during the trial, Joe, I was on the phone every day, talking with the judge. Every day, doing what I do best, talking on the telephone, making sure that timid Yid nebbish on the bench did his duty to America, to history. That sweet unprepossessing woman, two kids, boo-hoo-hoo, reminded us all of our little Jewish mamas – she came this close to getting life; I pleaded till I wept to put her in the chair. Me. I did that. I would have fucking pulled the switch if they’d have let me. Why? Because I fucking hate traitors. Because I fucking hate communists. Was it legal? Fuck legal. Am I a nice man? Fuck nice. They say terrible things about me in the Nation. Fuck the Nation. You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective? Make the law, or submit to it - you choose.

(Note that some of this is truncated in the film, but the majority is presented as written)

Roy shrugs.

ROY: When I tried the Rosenbergs, I wanted so badly to see those pinko kikes fry for giving the Ruskies the bomb. Judge Kaufman had no trouble sending Julius to the chair. But Ethel was a mother with young kids. She was supposed to live.

Roy takes a step towards Donald.

ROY: The Soviets understand one thing. Toughness. So during the trial, I'd slip out at lunch to a phone booth and call Kaufman. I went to work on him. Ethel had to go. We’re at war with an evil empire. If a woman has to cook in the chair to win, I’m fine with that.

Donald looks at Roy, finally accepting who Roy really is.

ROY: By the time I was done, Kaufman was ready to pull the lever himself. It was fun watching that bitch fry.

He locks eyes with Donald.

ROY: You have to be willing to do anything, to anyone, to win. If your father got that, he wouldn’t be stuck in Queens.

As to your main point, I understand where you and others are coming from in calling this a horror film, but there's just too much lowbrow goofiness and name-checking to get me there. For me, the "horrific" elements of the last half-hour seemed to be in the same sarcastic register of the previous 90 minutes, slick video effects notwithstanding. Either the filmmakers are genuinely entertained by the wacky shenanigans and they made a resist-lib goof-fest on purpose (something that I want no part of), or, more generously, they were not confident enough to make something that sustained a genuinely unsettling tone and thus added a bunch of poorly placed comic relief. Either way the film is a failure.

[knives]

I mostly liked this. The style is attempting that sort of alien ‘80s thing NWR, though admittedly not as good. The real star is definitely the central four performances which I do think provided an additional depth the film wouldn’t otherwise have had. There’s something about the awkwardness of Stan’s Trump, for example, which really highlights the weakness pitiable grotesquery of his character beyond any sort of vague hatred of Trump that may have inspired the film.

[Gregory]

I'd categorize this more as an exploitation film rather than horror. Before watching it, I knew that there was some sort of controversy about the rape scene but I didn't know what anyone had said about it. For me the most disturbing aspect was how the scene abruptly cuts off to juxtapose that act with Ivana being an arguably complicit public trophy wife immediately after the rape. But the point of the rape scene and the film itself is to showcase Trump (and Cohn's) grotesqueness, and there is little space afforded any of the victims, Ivana or anyone else. It reminded me of Pauline Kael's review of A Clockwork Orange, where she points out how the film carefully estranges the viewer from the victims' suffering.
At the end of the film when Trump goes under the knife, I looked away from the screen not so much to avoid experiencing that visual unpleasantness but more because it felt like the film smacking me over the head with the grotesquery. We get it.