Donald Trump is a difficult figure for Hollywood’s mimics. His mannerisms are too bizarre to be lampooned. He is too straightforwardly detestable to be pierced by satire. For the past eight years, Trump impersonators have been pursing their mouths into duck lips and slicing the air with limp hands, trying to nail him, and for the past eight years, they have largely failed to land a blow.
The exaggeration of caricature, the way it strains to turn Trump into a cartoon character of himself, seems to transform him into an archetype instead. Perversely, it renders him superhuman, a chaotic force of nature who cannot be controlled or stopped. Whenever I watch a Trump comedy sketch, no matter how petty or powerless their version of Trump is, I can’t shake the feeling that somehow, it’s helping him win.
The latest imitator to take on Trump is Sebastian Stan, who gamely swaths himself in prosthetics to play a young Donald Trump on the come-up in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice. The Trump Stan and Abbasi conjure together offers us few new insights into the man himself, but they do manage to pull off something I haven’t seen before. The Apprentice shows you Trump as a performance, a little unreal, a little eerie, without ever feeling as though it’s losing points to Trump the man.
Stan builds his Trump gradually, starting him out as a callow and uncertain young man who, outside of the petulant jut of his jaw, could be almost any 1970s New York striver. As The Apprentice opens, Donald is in his late 20s, shaking down his dad’s tenants for rent, trying to scheme his way into exclusive Manhattan members-only clubs. His life changes when he enters the crosshairs of Roy Cohn, the lawyer, fixer, and historical monster, here played with reptilian elan by Jeremy Strong. Roy teaches Donald the dirty tricks that help him break through into the glitz and glamour of Manhattan’s power centers so that he can at last begin building his gilded towers.
It’s during his first encounter with Roy that Stan’s Donald loses his generic quality and abruptly blinks into focus as someone who is very clearly Donald Trump. Blustering nervously about the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against his father, who refuses to rent to Black tenants, Donald flaps his hands out and declares, “I think it’s a disgrace.”
You suck in your breath, you clap your hands over your mouth. It’s not like Alec Baldwin impersonating Trump or Sarah Cooper lip-syncing Trump, or any of the late-night hosts lapsing into a half-hearted Trump during their news segments. Stan is not doing Trump. He’s being Trump. And the thing that makes Trump Trump, in this movie, is grievance. The first time he’s recognizable is the first time he starts to complain about all the ways he’s been done wrong.
Again and again, Stan’s Donald spends The Apprentice cataloging the ways in which he has been sinned against. The city is arrayed against him in blocking his quest to revitalize the depressed midtown Manhattan by building a luxury hotel. His alcoholic brother is an embarrassment. His wife Ivana (played here by the likable Maria Bakalova) is so domineering that she has cheated him out of a real marriage. (Donald’s eventual violent rape of Ivana, which occurs onscreen, is probably the most controversial element of the film, but it’s based on Ivana’s divorce deposition.)
This is what is at the heart of Trump, The Apprentice argues: the sense that the world owes him something better than what he has, and someone else is unjustly trying to keep it from him. That conviction is what drives him to reach out with greedy, grasping hands and take what he wants for himself.
To say that Donald Trump is powered by grievance is not a novel insight. The political press realized long ago that grievance is his strongest political weapon: He appeals to his base by telling them that they are due more than they got and that someone (migrants, the woke, the coastal elite) is preventing them from taking what is owed to them. The Apprentice is not telling us anything particularly new with its portrait of Trump.
What it offers instead is the ability to make the tired old trope feel viscerally true. As Donald, Stan glazes his eyes until they are empty and hungry and resentful. He looks across a candlelit lounge at Roy Cohn and sees a hunger that matches his own, and you flinch. Nothing good can come out of that much combined need.
It is visceral, also, to watch Trump learn to be Trump, to see him build the persona that has given our comedians so much trouble. Something about seeing Trump take on his now-familiar mannerisms one by one, like a Bond villain assembling his disguise, makes the whole thing feel more threadbare than ever. Trump didn’t just happen, you realize; he is not an immovable natural force. He designed himself. In The Apprentice, most of Trump’s bluster emerges from a kind of clumsy aping of Roy Cohn, who teaches him that he needs to hype himself up, think about his suits, and watch out for his “big ass.”
In the moral universe of The Apprentice, Roy becomes more likable than Donald because he is a genuine aesthete. Roy parties with Warhol, fills his home with some of the finest art of the 20th century, and starts every morning with a hundred situps. He’s a demon, but he’s the Mephistophelean kind, with good taste.
Donald, in contrast, mirrors Roy by lining his mansion with tacky faux-rococo paneling and getting liposuction. His aesthetic reveals itself to be so much gilding, an attempt to copy Roy’s genuine snobbery without the style to back it up.
In the film’s emotional climax, Donald brings Roy, now dying, to Mar-a-Lago for a party. Donald has frozen Roy out since it became clear that his malady is AIDS, rather than liver cancer as he claimed, and that his grasp on power has faltered. Still, Donald seems to want to reconcile with his old friend and mentor before Roy dies. As a peace offering, he gives Roy cufflinks he tells him are sterling silver, set with Tiffany diamonds, engraved with the Trump logo.
Touched, Roy shows the gift to Ivana. She looks at him with pity and tells him that the cufflinks are pewter and cubic zirconia. They’re cheap fakes stamped with the Trump name. Roy, in response, bursts into tears.
The true stab here isn’t just that Donald lied to Roy on his deathbed, or that Donald would so callously reject the friend who turned him from an outer-borough reject into a mover and shaker within Manhattan. It’s that he does it with fake diamonds. He doesn’t have the good taste to get real jewelry. Everything he has to offer is hollow and fake — everything except for the grievance screaming out from the heart of him.
Every so often, The Apprentice puts its finger too hard on the scales in its eagerness to connect the dots between Donald’s past and the grim, Trumpian present. One rickety scene sees Roger Stone bringing Donald a “Let’s Make America Great Again” button from the Reagan campaign and chatting about his presidential aspirations. Donald says he doesn’t want the job, but he’d love a blowjob on Air Force One. Get the joke?
Where The Apprentice comes to life, though, it is startlingly haunting. One jaw-dropping sequence comes toward the end of the film, when Donald, now heavier and balding, goes under the knife for liposuction and scalp stapling. The camera drifts from the slimy tube sucking fat out of his belly, across his contentedly snoozing face — mouth open and jaw slack — to the back of his head, where his scalp has been sliced open across the bald spot. Then it lingers there on the bloody, fleshy spot to show us the crude staples meant to preserve the Trumpian hairline.
To create the Trump image, to vindicate the Trump grievances — well, to do all that, it takes body horror.
Source: vox.com
