Film Review: “The Apprentice” — Marinating in Malignance
By Michael Marano
It’s Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Roy Cohn that hangs in this not-very-good movie like a Rembrandt on the cracked plaster of a La Quinta suite by the airport.
The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi. Screening at AMC Theaters and Coolidge Corner Theatre.
We’re having a weird cinematic reckoning with the New York (real and metaphoric) of the early 1980s.
Coppola’s Meglopolis is so dead-on casting the allegorical early ’80s New York as the center of a new Roman Empire (in terms of wealth and power), Coppola just out-and-out renamed Manhattan “New Rome.”
The extraordinary Joker: Folie à Deux and the equally extraordinary HBO/Max series The Penguin (a continuation of the 2022 film, The Batman) are Batman stories without Batman, both depicting people on the peripheries of society as trash and debris on the street to be bulldozed out of the way while the real movers and shakers of Gotham enact their plans. Yeah, The Penguin, unlike Joker: Folie à Deux, is not set in the early ’80s. But Gotham has always been a stand-in for New York, and the vibe of early ’80s corruption, moral decay, and coercion in The Penguin is so palpable that it feels like it’s not just a sequel to The Batman, but also to A Most Violent Year.
This trend suggests that early ’80s New York is as much Ground Zero for where our world is now as was the Trinity Blast, depicted in Oppenheimer. And, like the Trinity blast, early ’80s New York contains teratogenic properties that spit out evil mutants generations after the fact. Early ’80s New York was larger-than-life, and it created larger-than-life, real-life villains worthy of the best Batman graphic novels: Rudy Giuliani; Roger Stone; the serial killer “star” of two The Jinx series, real estate scion Robert Durst.
The most grotesque mutant to come out of early ’80s New York is, of course, Donald Trump, whose mentorship in malignance under Joe McCarthy’s attack dog, Roy Cohn is the subject of the new movie, The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi.
Alas, while The Apprentice, of all these films and shows, most directly addresses the extent to which early ’80s New York has warped our current world and undercut our psychological health, it’s the least interesting. Those who have the most rudimentary understanding or awareness of Trump’s life will be given no new insights. And for those who have no understanding of Trump’s life, The Apprentice will come across as a haphazard series of disconnected anecdotes. There’s no sense of escalation to the plot of The Apprentice, even though there are hints of ever-increasing stakes and ever-increasing emotional cruelty.
This is not to say The Apprentice doesn’t have some remarkable virtues. Like Joker: Folie à Deux, the film captures the sleaze and the grime of living in a large East Coast City at the dawn of the Reagan Era. True, The Apprentice starts in the early ’70s, but the vibe captured by Abbasi and his cinematographer Kasper Tuxen (who shot The Worst Person in the World) from the film’s opening shot is pure CHUD-like rot and decay. The movie’s look posits that the NYC of the ’70s — defined by crumbling buildings and White Flight, and the wretched, gold-plated excesses of the ’80s — was unified by grunge.
The Apprentice could have descended into what felt like an extended, and not very funny, SNL skit (much in the way Oliver Stone’s inert W. biopic did) were it not for the performances by Sebastian Stan as Trump, Jeremy Strong as Cohn, and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump. (That Bakalova had a real, and not-very-nice and deeply uncomfortable close encounter with Trump crony Giuliani in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm adds a certain sweaty-palmed veracity to how Ivanka is treated in this movie…as an object, a trophy, and worse.)
Overall, The Apprentice is pretty much a lifeless and dull affair, but it still should at least be caught on home video because of the uncanny performances of Stan and Strong. Absurdly handsome Stan used minimal prosthetics to capture Trump’s melted Silly Putty looks, his mannerisms and quirks. He gained 15 pounds for the role, but moves as if he is carrying much more bulk… not just physical bulk, but also the bulk of Trump’s monstrous grandiosity. Stan even evokes glimmers of humanity in Trump, which is admirable.
But it’s Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Cohn that hangs in this not-very-good movie like a Rembrandt on the cracked plaster of a La Quinta suite by the airport.
Cohn can be played like a cartoon. There was a hint of parody to Pacino’s portrayal of him in Angels in America. Sinister and malignant parody, but parody, nonetheless. James Woods made Cohn into a kind of puckish trickster in the biopic Citizen Cohn. Strong’s take on Cohn is full-on bilious — this is a guy who marinates in his own malignance. This jaundiced Cohn sweats moral sickness; in fact, this might be the best, most understated portrait of a psychopath caught on screen.
It’s just a damned shame The Apprentice isn’t a better movie. There’s heroic work done here by all involved. But their efforts ultimately feel like they’re tilting at a MAGA windmill. Of course Trump, in mid-rant, would say the windmill causes cancer. But that’s beside the point. America’s moral rot has grown exponentially since the rancid decline of early ’80s New York, and we are still coming to terms with that period. God knows when (or if) we will process what we are going through now.
Back in the 1980s, writer, editor, and personal trainer Michael Marano (www.BluePencilMike.com) was a student teacher in a suburban high school in a wealthy community outside Buffalo. His students all looked like the antagonists from Revenge of the Nerds. He asked one class, with regard to poor, non-landowners fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War, “Would you die to protect Donald Trump’s interests?” He did not expect the responses he got, and he’s now fairly certain at least a few of those kids grew up to go to the Capitol on January 6.