Robert Buckland reviews 'The Apprentice'

Roy Cohns protégé: Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump | Image by: FlixPix / Alamy Stock Photo

4 minutes of readingOctober 31

It's easy to forget, but Donald Trump was in our collective consciousness for a very long time before he ran for president. The apprenticewhich opened in theaters this month after a legal battle by Trump's lawyers to prevent its showing, is a reminder of how long it's been around — and how it all started.

We are transported, via cinematography reminiscent of 1980s television, to a dark, bankrupt and seedy New York of the 70s and early 80s, just before the publication of Trump's book, The art of the market – full of hyperbole and written entirely by co-writer Tony Schwartz – appeared and sealed his fame. The insight of journalist Otto Friedrich Time A 1989 magazine cover story about Trump contains a lot of primary material, but it's this anonymous observation from one of Trump's own associates that still stands out: “Trump is a brilliant negotiator who almost no sense of his own emotions or his own identity… He is a kind of black hole in space, which cannot be filled no matter what Trump does.” The associate predicted that Trump would “build bigger and bigger projects… but ultimately end up, like Howard Hughes, a multi-billionaire living all alone in a room.”

Any film about Trump will only succeed if it captures this feeling of nothingness; that behind his bluster and bluster there is only a void where the truth must be avoided, his best lines stolen from others. This is probably the main reason why the former and potential future president did not want to The apprentice what needs to be shown is that he does it quite well.

The casting is well judged. Sebastian Stan's Trump is not a one-dimensional representation. Instead, we see a vulnerable and uncertain Donald initially overwhelmed by the much stronger Roy Cohn, whose searing portrayal by Jeremy Strong (Succession Kendall Roy) is the central pillar of this film. For politicians, know that this is a film about business. The precise reason why the racial housing discrimination lawsuit filed against Trump was settled in 1975 may not be due to the reason given in this film. But it does give us a clear sense of how Trump ended up using lawsuits and challenges as opportunities and weapons, and that his lawyer Cohn's approach, “never admit, never explain,” was a approach that he would adopt in spades.

So it's a familiar sorcerer's apprentice story, but without a sensible resolution.

Only much later do we see the roles reversed and the dying Cohn – whose inability to admit his own sexuality, even to himself, is brilliantly encapsulated in Strong's performance – being patronized and alienated by his protégé . Stan plays Trump as an evolving caricature, in love with his own publicity, stripped of his initial doubt and on the verge of making costly investment mistakes in Atlantic City casinos. The duo is well supported by Martin Donovan's portrayal of Trump's father, Fred, the adoring family martinet, and by Maria Bakalova's portrayal of Trump's first wife, Ivana, who is initially rebuffed by Trump – a feeling she never really gets over.

So this is a familiar sorcerer's apprentice story, but without a sensible resolution and with an almost exclusive focus on the swing of the pendulum from teacher to student. Roger Stone (the true creator of Cohn's first rule “attack, attack, attack”) gets off very lightly as Cohn's seemingly harmless sidekick, and there are character cameos from Andy Warhol and Rupert Murdoch, although I doubt Murdoch would have allowed himself to do it. be close to the shenanigans we see at the party at Cohn's.

Passionless and emotionally sterile, the Trump we see depicted here on screen is not simply a sinister figure but, almost more alarmingly, an empty vessel who, as Cohn's apprentice, learned to hide reality by creating its own truth.

Robert Buckland is a former Conservative MP for South Swindon and Justice Secretary

The apprentice
Led by: Ali Abassi
Place: General cinema release

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