How do you make a movie about Donald Trump?
The controversial biographical movie, “The Apprentice,” by Ali Abbasi, which opened in theaters across the country on Friday, Oct. 11, seeks to answer this very question.
“I’m playing a guy named Roy, and you’re playing a guy named Donald,” actor Jeremy Strong said to actor Sebastian Stan at the beginning of filming, as they grounded their larger-than-life personas into everyday individuals.
The Roy and Donald in question are Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. Cohn was the infamous American lawyer and prosecutor who rose to prominence in assisting Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of suspected communists. Trump needs no introduction.
The pair are brilliantly portrayed by Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan, respectively, in a biopic that seeks to capture how this apprenticeship throughout the 1970s and 1980s shaped both Trump’s personal trajectory and the trajectory of America as we know it.
This uniquely human approach to the subject matter is where “The Apprentice” shines brightest. In particular, Stan’s complex performance captures surprisingly candid insights into the real estate mogul.
Were Trump’s instincts natural or were they nurtured by Cohn? This overarching dramatic thesis separates “The Apprentice” from the litany of documentaries, fiction films and satire that have been produced in the wake of Trump’s political reign.
This more direct probing into the personal lives of Trump and those involved has also led the movie to be the subject of stirring controversy.
Trump’s campaign threatened legal action against the film after its Cannes Film Festival premiere in May. Because no studio wanted to muddy the political waters by releasing the film prior to the U.S election in November, the film was almost prevented from being seen at all.
In an unlikely move, a little known distributor named Briarcliff Entertainment snatched the U.S distribution rights for the film, and it is now being released in thousands of theaters across the country.
“The Apprentice” has quickly become the movie the Trump campaign does not want you to see.
Unfortunately, the film never quite lives up to its initial promise. Although it provides a compellingly entertaining watch, it ultimately results in a rather familiar experience, which is one that fails to identify any unique revelations on Trump’s rise to power and its further sociopolitical implications.
By the end, the film becomes lost in minutiae, feeling small in scale as opposed to large in implication. One cannot help but think of Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which covers similar historical specificities while providing a more universal treatise on capitalism and the psychology of power.
How do you make a movie about Donald Trump? The answer is more complicated than it maybe would have initially appeared, and it may take longer than we expect for a film to truly capture the multifaceted figure in a truly satisfying and revelatory manner.
“The Apprentice” is a step in the right direction, but simply falls short of my vote.
“The Apprentice” is now playing in theaters nationwide.
