The Apprentice (2024)

Rated R for sexuality and, more importantly, an incredibly graphic rape scene.  The foundation of who Donald Trump is in this movie is built on a complete lack of empathy.  Because of this, people are cruel to each other all through the film.  The movie also has that Wolf of Wall Street attention to vice, despite the fact that Trump himself often doesn't partake in drugs or alcohol.    Still, this movie more than embraces its R-rating.

DIRECTOR: Ali Abbasi

Come on.  This is a layup for me, right?  I mean, this is me, straight up embracing my cultural biases.  The Apprentice wasn't made for anyone but for people who reflect the same political values.  But I kept hearing that the movie might not have been any good.  Listen, I'm not the guy who can tell you this.  I loved it.  Absolutely loved it.  The biggest problem, for me, is the fact that I can't use it as a teaching document because biopics aren't documentaries.  But do you know how much I would want to cite parts of this movie to tell people how much they should be afraid of a man like Donald Trump.

In terms of a movie, The Apprentice is brilliant.  Again, not a big fan of biopics.  I tend to find them follow the same layout, copy and paste.  But Ali Abbasi has an eye on him.  Part of it is the idea that any kind of takedown of Donald Trump can't be a standard presentation of how much of a turd he is.  Instead, we have this Mean Streets Martin Scorsese approach to this film.  Now, I'm going to show my hypocrisy off here.  I hated Joker when it gave a movie a vintage Scorsese pastiche, but I love when The Apprentice does it?  Yeah, I'm a huge turd.  The reality is that I like the pastiche in Joker.  I just disliked the movie.  Trust me, if you want me on your team, you are going to make the film look a little vintage.  But back to the lambasting of Donald Trump!  Donald Trump mentally lives in the late '70s.  Every part of him seems influenced over what happens in The Apprentice.  The film takes the argument that Donald Trump went from a wishy-washy dork to a dumb shark because of the tutelage of Roy Cohn.

So to set the movie in the grimiest version of New York with an aesthetic to match that dirty '70s vibe that movies like The French Connection were so good at achieving is smart as heck.  I look at this era in history fondly because I never lived through it.  Instead, there's something Bukowskiesque (I hate me too) about this era in history.  Part of it is that Donald Trump only succeeded because he became the King of Turd Mountain.  (I want this blog to be really crass, despite having thousands of entries where I avoided any vulgar language whatsoever.) Just to avoid constant caveats, please be aware that I'm talking about the character of Donald Trump as presented in The Apprentice, even though I think that they might be one-in-the-same.  Donald Trump was born at just the right time to become what he has become.  He lived in an era where the world was falling apart under its own stupidity.  It was on the verge of the '80s, where things got bigger and bigger and --to a certain extent --prideful in its own stupidity.  Trust me, as someone who is living in 2025, I can't deny that stupidity spreads.

Maybe it wasn't stupidity.  Donald Trump is simultaneously a con man and the most earnest man in the world.  The Apprentice's Trump is a guy who believes his own press and that's mostly due to Roy Cohn.  I didn't know much about Roy Cohn before watching this movie.  By that logic, I still don't.  What I don't understand is Cohn's decision to make Trump a pet project.  The one thing that is made very clear to me is that Cohn is the one person who was never taken in by Trump's hubris.  He saw this guy who tooted his own horn, Willy Loman but with success, and took him under his wing.  I don't quite get it.  Part of my read of Cohn at the beginning of the movie is that Trump becomes his apprentice mainly because Cohn has nothing to do.  Cohn molds Trump into this mover and shaker because he sees the perfect vehicle for corruption.  But there's a big difference between Cohn and Trump, at least from a morality perspective.

Cohn knows he's evil.  I don't know how smart Roy Cohn was.  I get the vibe that Cohn was a monster, using his talents for his own sense of success.  It's why everything around Cohn is about excess.  Trump never really thought about morality.  It's odd, because we don't really have a moral grounding in the movie shy of the few scenes with Trump's mom.  I often ask my students if they ever made a mistake on a grand scale if they'd like to be considered evil or incompetent.  With Cohn and Trump, they are evil and incompetent respectively.  Regardless of Trump's stupidity, it doesn't change the fact that the man completely lacks empathy.  That's something that I can glean from the real world.  He never feels anything for anyone.  It's such a depressing concept that someone that powerful can't even entertain the notion that other people exist around him.  He rapes Ivana because he's bored with her.  He's angry not that he might not sexually satisfy her, but the notion that she is a burden by her mere existence.  It's incredibly depressing.

My favorite thing about this movie, though, is the exact characterization of Cohn and Trump.  I can't deny The Wolf of Wall Street vibe that the movie teases.  But it's not The Wolf of Wall Street by itself.  It's The Wolf of Wall Street by means of Napoleon Dynamite.  Roy Cohn lives in a drug fueled, sex-addled fantasy world where he rules with an iron fist.  Donald Trump is a man boy playing dress up.  They both think that they are amazing, but both of them are insufferable from moment one.  It's two guys who think that they're incredibly cool.  But every scene together is in that awkward place where people would talk about how uncomfortable these two made them.  There are scenes of outrageous wealth being displayed.  If it was anyone else, it would be a Pennies from Heaven sequence.  But adding Roy Cohn and Donald Trump into these scenes, you'd be counting the seconds until you got to get yourself out of that.  I love it.  As evil as these turds are, they're more insufferable and losery than anything else.  I mean, points for having Donald Trump trip in a snowsuit.  I honestly wondered how Ivana could stand being married to this man.  I don't know how anyone could be in a room with him at all.

I do have a confession to make.  I used to pride myself on the notion that I didn't hate anyone.  I was taught that the very notion of hate was a toxic concept and sinful in itself.  I still really do think this.  But I earnestly hate Donald Trump.  He is the worst person on this planet (when it comes to making broad strokes) and I genuinely hate him. I'm not proud of that.   I'm taught that I should love my enemies.  But Donald Trump disgusts me on such a visceral level that I can't even pretend to hide it.  There have been so many things lambasting Donald Trump and his cronies.  But The Apprentice somehow seems like the most artistic and authentic take on the current president.  Just beat-for-beat, I found the take on Trump fascinating.  Yeah, it's a bit much and it's a bit shameless.  But it is also a movie that resonated so strongly with me that I couldn't help but applaud.  This movie was incredible.