Ali Abbasi, Gabriel Sherman, The Apprenice
The making of the film The Apprenticereleased in France on October 9 and in the United States on October 11, is in itself at least as incredible as its subject: who would have imagined a few years ago that the first biographical film about Donald Trump would be made by a director born in Iran, Ali Abbasi – and whose arrival in the United States for filming was blocked for a time due to the “Muslim ban” introduced in January 2017 by Trump -, co-financed by the son-in-law of a billionaire and collaborator of the Trump campaigns. former president, Dan Snyder, and will be released just four weeks before what is shaping up to be the closest election in recent US history, and possibly the last in which Trump participates.
The Apprentice is more a film about the relationship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump than a biopic about Trump himself. In fact, the script leaves no doubt about Gabriel Sherman’s declared intention to depoliticize as much as possible a film whose mere announcement of release was enough to trigger a formal notification from the former president’s lawyers, as well as threats from his campaign against Sherman and the American distributors.
The period of the film, which spans from 1973, when the two men met, to 1986, when Roy Cohn died, stops just before the early beginnings of Donald Trump’s political career. It was in 1987 when he denounced, in a paid opinion article published in three of the country’s main newspapers (the New York Timeshe Washington Post and the Boston Globe), the alleged abuses of the United States’ partners (Japan, Saudi Arabia “and others”), who supposedly took advantage of Washington’s protection of their interests without paying anything in return. It was at the same time, at the end of 1987, when Trump became a “public figure” and gradually shed his image as a real estate developer, participating in the Larry King show on CNN and later organizing his first rally. at the Rotary Club of Portsmouth, in October 1987. A few days later, he published The Art of the Dealhis first book—written entirely by Tony Schwartz—in which he described his daily life and charted his career.
Sherman wanted to portray the origins of the Trump program on screen more than Trump himself. The film is well-documented and draws on details aired since the 1980s in a series of reference books, including Jerome Tucille’s first biography of Trump, published in 1985, and his description of the young real estate developer’s clothing style, who proudly wore burgundy suits, embroidered shirts and imitated his father by wearing cufflinks engraved with “DJT.” Like his father’s, the cufflinks also matched the personalized license plate of his Cadillac, chauffeur-driven through the streets of Queens and Manhattan. One of the film’s iconic scenes is taken from the pages of Lost Tycoonwritten by Harry Hurt III (1993), while the character’s psychological traits resonate with the family portrait painted by the former president’s niece, Mary Trump, in Too Much and Never Enough (2020).
The viewer moves alongside the young promoter — best known in the early 1970s as the son of Fred Trump — in the halls of the “Club,” a members-only restaurant where he meets Roy Cohn, then a formidable lawyer known for his role as an adviser to Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and in the Rosenberg case, in the dining room of the family home in Jamaica Estates and on the cobblestones of 42nd Street, where Trump’s career took off after his renovation of the Commodore Hotel, now called Hyatt Grand Central. Although the film was not shot in New York, but in Toronto, the 1970s style and general aesthetic are more reminiscent of Taxi Driverby Martin Scorsese, who went to the boardroom of Trump Tower, the scene of Trump’s famous statements “you are fired” in the reality television series The Apprenticethirty years later.
This was, in effect, the risk of choosing a topic like Trump, seen thousands of times on television and who seems to have been constantly in the news for the past nine years. In order not to seem like a caricature, Abbasi had to avoid falling into the line that could have placed the viewer in a form of Trumpian maelstrom, entering the room after receiving a notification push which read “Trump said XXX about immigrants”, watching a quasi-copy of Trump on the big screen before leaving the room to read on his phone how he had called Kamala Harris during the previous two hours.
However rigorous it may be, The Apprentice It is still a work of fiction. One of the few criticisms that can be made of Sherman is that he may have wanted to distance himself too much from Trump himself, who seems more like a spectator than an actor in his life for much of the film. His education, his life path, his family situation and even his personality are relegated to a secondary role, suggesting that Trump is a creature almost devoid of free will, perfectly malleable and molded by Roy Cohn, the mentor who would have single-handedly inclined the former president towards his “dark side.”
Aside from a few scenes, such as those showing Trump getting liposuction on his stomach, swallowing meth pills to lose weight, or having part of his head scalped to hide his baldness, Trump would probably enjoy watching The Apprentice. The young promoter, a bit of a dandy, stands out for his drive, his business acumen, his charm and his healthy lifestyle, without alcohol, tobacco or drugs (at least consciously). Roy Cohn’s teachings—”never admit you’re wrong,” “deny everything, admit nothing,” “attack, attack, attack”—and Trump’s gradual application of them are the film’s greatest strength.
The Apprentice It is the story of a transition. Unlike most recent biopics about living personalities —Priscillaprobably A Complete Unknown…—, the film does not end with the final version of Trump. If he had already become known for his transactional style, his closeness to dictators, his sexism and his aversion to any form of truth, Sherman would not have been able to predict in 2017, when the script was being finalized, that Trump would try to fraud to get re-elected. nor his role on January 6, 2021. Thus, The Apprentice It portrays an intermediate form of Trump, who still had a grip on reality. If we followed the logic put in place by Abbasi to the end, we would need a second part to try to dissect the new form that emerged after the 2016 elections. There is no doubt that it would go far beyond any of Roy Cohn’s maxims.
