One of the murkier criticisms bandied at studies of unlovely figures – you may or may not define Donald Trump this way – is that such projects tend to “humanise” the subjects. If that means to represent them as human this is surely not a bad thing. It makes for a cosy life to dismiss the malign as monsters above the concerns of ordinary Homo sapiens. The worry, one presumes, is that the allegedly humanising project invites us to see the sinister figure as “humane”. That is a different thing.
You couldn’t say there is much of that in Ali Abbasi’s already much chewed-over trot through the early outrages of the Republican Party’s current candidate for president of the United States. The nicest thing you could say about Sebastian Stan’s fish-mouthed bumbler is that he seems, at first anyway, to be wearyingly pathetic. His father is a bully. The lovely people barely notice him. He spends his days avoiding pots of boiling water as he collects rent from Dad’s crumbling slums. When he does find a helpful mentor, that man barks orders like a sleek, reptilian drill instructor. “Always claim victory! Never admit defeat! Deny everything!” Poor wee Donald.
The mentor is the notorious attorney Roy Cohn. Played here with restraint and relish by a perfectly cast Jeremy Strong, the New Yorker facilitated Joe McCarthy during the anti-communist witch hunts of the early 1950s, helped prosecute the Rosenbergs and went on to become head fixer for a host of rapacious businessmen.
Cohn and Trump’s meeting in a high-end restaurant has something of the high-school drama about it. The businessman is alone at his table. The lawyer is cackling with the “cool kids” – here poisonous, damp-mouthed plutocrats – when he sees the up-and-comer and recognises an opportunity. What we have here is something like a supervillain origin story, with Cohn spelling out almost every negative trait that now defines the former president. That makes for momentum, but the approach – supposing a man is made by other men alone – is also inherently trivial and reductive.
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Abbasi, the gifted Iranian-Danish director of Border and Holy Spider, is, as well as charting the birth of an ogre, examining the passage of New York from the bankrupt 1970s to the vulgar 1980s. That decaying city was cinematic at the time and remains so when re-created in washed-out colours by Kasper Tuxen’s camera. The footage of piled rubbish and pockmarked masonry looks as if it has been left to decay since the events depicted. The brash fizz of the later sections hardly feels more attractive.
Neither actor is exactly attempting an impersonation. Strong, offering a less self-doubting aggressor than his Kendall Roy from Succession, fires through the uptown streets like a barracuda through prey-rich water. Stan, dealing with a much more familiar figure, rations his appropriations to softened consonants and that weird mouth affectation that suggests an unfulfilled inclination to whistle. There is, for good or ill, little hint of the satanic charisma that won over many who should have known better. It seems unlikely that this version could have got so far as the real thing managed.
That said, the flatness of the film’s Trump adds an extra level of unease to his moments of outright villainy. Nothing is so disturbing as what The Apprentice portrays as his almost instinctive rape of Ivana Trump, his wife at the time, who is played by a sharp Maria Bakalova, after she taunts him for his orangeness. (Ivana said that, though she claimed, in her divorce deposition, that Trump raped her, she did not want her words “to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense”.) The moment feels at odds with a film that otherwise shrouds itself in shade and restraint. It is elsewhere closed-in, phlegmatic and drab. Everything that Donald Trump is not.
The Apprentice opens in cinemas on Friday, October 18th
