The Apprentice

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Just when you thought you were comfortable in your movie seat, here is “The Apprentice,” an origin story about Mr. Trump directed by Ali Abbasi (“Holy Spider”). The film is off-putting and eerie, precisely because it aims to treat Trump as if he is in fact, a normal citizen.

The film is an accurate character study featuring Trump and Roy Cohn. The execution however is cheerless, stale, lacking energy, and charge. This is a strange film for being so accurate almost perfectly so, but without momentum or dramatic energy.

Trump (Sebastian Stan) is in front of our eyes in a 1980s New York City with garbage all around him as he cheerlessly marches into a nightclub. He sits down, regaling a lady with tales about money. She is underwhelmed as we should be.

Alone, Trump catches the eye of the baleful reptilian Cohn (played to perfection by Jeremy Strong) and history is made.

Trump nonchalantly sits with a table of fat men resembling gangsters. Cohn is impressed that his new acquaintance is the status seeking son of Fred Trump Sr. (Martin Donovan) and sees something in the blond mop of the young man that Cohn can mold and shape in his image.

Trump is smitten.

Trump asks his friend to help him with a discrimination suit involving racist allegations, and Cohn reluctantly agrees.

Trump sees Ivana (Maria Bakalova) at Cohn’s residence and is hypnotized, then miffed to hear that she has a lover.

Trump smirks dumbly.

Andy Warhol (Bruce Beaton) tells him that the only real art is the art of making money.

From Cohn Trump learns three rules: attack, admit to nothing and never admit defeat.

Trump pursues Ivana once more. She remains unmoved. The blond man then stalks her in a ski lodge where he admits to being a psychological “killer,” Ivana then consents to the relationship, only to bristle over the prenup which disrespects her.

Again, Trump gets his way, the gold-plated gangster, by brute force.

The film then shifts into a montage of self-serving, in your face victories. Trump is a black velvet John Gotti with no taste or social grace.

Trump becomes repulsed by Ivana, frequently prone to rage and he rapes her.

The most arresting segment of the film illustrates the surgical enhancement of Trump as he undergoes liposuction and a scalp replacement to regrow his mop. Donald Trump is Roy Cohn’s Frankenstein creation, galvanized by blood and fat for a new McCarthy era America. Emotionally as depicted, Donald Trump is a fast-food fascist, savvy but not smart (either emotionally or mentally) and he never reads.

Trump is a man of golden arches who arch-steps to the Right, ultimately betraying his mentor and creator Mr. Roy Cohn, with callous and hurtful savagery.

In the final moment as the camera zooms in on his blue eye, Trump is a pre-made robot filled with the Reaganite slogan: Make America Great Again. Even Trump’s campaign catchphrase is unoriginal.

Trump is manufactured and produced, wired by Cohn, and wired to con.

The film falls flat as an emotive experience.

Andy Warhol once said “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

This film is conceptual, a Warhol silkscreen.

Trump is before us, rectangularly at every second: a putty faced man in a trench coat, brimming with blond anger—the annoyer, the manipulator and the racist.

“The Apprentice” can be seen as an art object without judgment.

No matter how you see this depressive, dispassionate film, one thing is clear: The man projected within it was produced to be narcissistic, driven by power-lust and full of impulsive rage.

As filmed and recorded in fiction and sadly, in real life, such a figure has no business to be put on the world stage a first time, let alone a second.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com