Despite formal notice and threats of prosecution, the highly anticipated The Apprentice (The apprentice) is on display Friday. Why so much sound and fury? Because it is a film about the rise of Donald Trump in the business world during the 1970s and 1980s, when the powerful but infamous lawyer Roy Cohn took him under his wing. Nuanced, but far from redeeming the main protagonist, this film directed by Ali Abbasi, to whom we owe the remarkable The nights of Mashhad (Holy Spider), offers an in-depth portrait, to the point of being corrosive. Sebastian Stan composes a young Trump who is both arrivistic and naive, but ultimately worrying.
In the role of Roy Cohn (1927-1986), Jeremy Strong (the series Succession) comes close to eclipsing his partner as his performance hypnotizes and galvanizes. It is true that at the time, the future fallen lawyer, who led a lot of things, was a character larger than life.
Conversely, Donald Trump had not yet created his thunderous “persona” of recent years. From then on, the restraint of Sebastian Stan (I, Tonya / Me, Tonya ; A Different Man) is welcome.
The other major character is Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife. Revealed in the sequel BoratMaria Bakalova is excellent in this role which, it must be said, turns out to be a little less fleshed out than the two male scores. No matter, Bakalova imposes it in her scenes with Stan, including the very harsh one of the rape. This passage is based on sworn testimony given in 1989 by Ivana Trump (1949-2022), and recorded in the couple’s divorce documents. In 2015, Ivana Trump returned to this testimony in a press release. Hence the fact that the inclusion of this sequence is not unanimous.
That being said, the relationship at the heart of the scenario written by political journalist Gabriel Sherman is not the union of Donald and Ivana Trump, but rather the special friendship formed by Donald Trump and Roy Cohn. Between a twisted father-son dynamic, on the side of a Trump disappointed by his dad, and “ bromance » one-sided homoerotic, from the side of a Cohn who keeps the door of the cupboard where he is officially located wide open, the whole thing is quite captivating.
His own reality
Initially, there is something a little comical (this is intentional, the film is not short of touches of black or satirical humor) in the spectacle of this young Donald Trump ready to do anything to become rich and powerful , but who, at this early stage of his career, still sometimes demonstrates an astonishing naivety.
Which naivety manifests itself during his first meetings with Roy Cohn, who has no moral or ethical sense, and is a completely uninhibited bully. But Trump is hungry and he’s learning quickly, starting with his mentor’s three golden rules: “Attack, attack, attack.” Don’t admit anything. Never admit defeat” (electoral?). Another striking piece of advice from the master to the student: “You must define your own reality. »
Moreover, in the very style of his film “based on facts, but where certain facts have been fictionalized, and certain names changed”, dixit the introductory intertitle, Ali Abbasi seems to echo this notion.
Filmed in raw and grainy 16mm, the 1970s give way, when the 1980s come, to an image filtered in such a way as to evoke the appearance of a VHS video of the time. All presented in a narrow 1.33:1 image ratio, with old-fashioned textures. This could be transmitted to us by the cathode ray screen of an old television.
Suddenly, it’s as if Ali Abbasi was giving us archives, which the film is far from being. But in doing so, the filmmaker finds a brilliant visual counterpart to the Trumpian concepts of alternative facts and post-truth.
The Rise of the Monster
Despite a length of just over two hours, the film doesn’t show any length: it rushes, it smashes, like the protagonist.
The ingenious construction helps, with the various acts revolving around Trump’s major real estate projects during the period in question. Thus the Hyatt Grand Central hotel, the Trump Tower and the Trump Taj Mahal Casino take on the value of narrative milestones, until the consecration.
Without forgetting a detour to Mar-a-Lago, towards the end, while a dying Roy Cohn contemplates, between shock and pride, the monster he helped to create.