The sinister empty vessel that is Donald Trump: Robert Buckland reviews 'The Apprentice'

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

Robert Buckland

@RobertBuckland

It’s easy to forget, but Donald Trump was in our collective consciousness for an awfully long time before he ran for the presidency. The Apprentice, which opened in cinemas this month after a legal battle by Trump’s lawyers to prevent its screening, is a reminder of just how long he has been around – and how it all started.

We are transported, via cinematography reminiscent of 1980s television, back to a gritty, bankrupt and seedy New York City of the 70s and early 80s, just before the publication of Trump’s book, The Art of The Deal – full of hyperbole and actually entirely written by co-author Tony Schwartz – appeared and sealed his fame. Journalist Otto Friedrich’s perceptive Time magazine cover article about Trump in 1989 contains much primary material, but it is this anonymous observation by one of Trump’s own associates that still stands out: “Trump is a brilliant dealmaker with 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 foresaw Trump “building bigger and bigger projects… but finally ending, like Howard Hughes, a multibillionaire living all alone in one room”.

Any film about Trump will only succeed if it captures that sense of nothingness; that behind his bluster and braggadocio is only a void where the truth must be avoided, with his best lines stolen from others. Probably the main reason why the former and potential future president did not want The Apprentice to be shown is that it does this rather well.

The casting is well-judged. Sebastian Stan’s Trump is no one-dimensional portrayal. Instead we see a vulnerable and uncertain Donald being initially overwhelmed by the much stronger Roy Cohn, whose searing portrayal by Jeremy Strong (Succession’s Kendall Roy) is the central pillar of this movie. For the politicos out there, be warned that this is a film about business. Precisely why the housing racial discrimination lawsuit filed against Trump was settled in 1975 may not have been for the reason given in this film. But it gives us a strong sense of how lawsuits and challenges came to be used by Trump as opportunities and weapons, and that his lawyer Cohn’s “never admit, never explain” approach was one that he would come to adopt in spades.

This, then, is a familiar sorcerer’s apprentice story, but without a sane resolution

It is only much later that we see the roles reversed and the dying Cohn – whose failure to admit his own sexuality even to himself is encapsulated brilliantly in Strong’s performance – being patronised and distanced by his protégé. Stan plays Trump as an evolving caricature in love with his own publicity, shorn of his initial self-doubt and about to make some costly investment mistakes in Atlantic City casinos. The duo is well-supported by Martin Donovan’s portrayal of Trump’s father Fred, from family martinet to dotage, and Maria Bakalova’s depiction of Trump’s first wife Ivana, who is initially repelled by Trump – a feeling she never really overcomes.

This, then, is a familiar sorcerer’s apprentice story, but without a sane resolution and with an almost exclusive focus on the swing of the pendulum away from teacher to student. Roger Stone (the actual originator of Cohn’s first rule of “attack, attack, attack”) gets off very lightly as Cohn’s seemingly inoffensive sidekick, and there are character cameos from Andy Warhol and Rupert Murdoch, although I doubt Murdoch would have allowed himself to be near any of the shenanigans we see at Cohn’s house party.

Passionless and emotionally barren, the Trump we see portrayed on screen here isn’t merely a sinister figure but, almost more alarmingly, an empty vessel who as Cohn’s apprentice learned to hide the reality by creating his own truth. 

Robert Buckland is former Conservative MP for South Swindon and justice secretary

The Apprentice
Directed by: Ali Abbasi
Venue: General cinema release

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