The Apprentice
The popular and much polarised American show “The Apprentice” has transformed into a narrative having some elements from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And who fulfills the role of the mad scientist in this version? Yes, it is Roy Cohn assisted by another terrible brute Fred Trump.
In a broad sense, it is not difficult to determine the surveying director Ali Abassi film boundaries, since it’s build around two fundamental and basic chapters, one is an hour in the `70s when a young, semi innocent Trump played by Sebastian Stan is taken under the wing by the forceful schemer Cohn played by Jeremy Strong and the other its one more about exactly a decade, when the Republican soon reaches such altitudes of extreme degeneracy and amorality that it will not reach in entire this life and most of the life. The former is fairly interesting what is basically the premise of the movie and is well executed but the latter just completely disintegrates because there’s an extreme absence of POV on the subject, or indeed hardly anything to say about it. The writer Gabriel Sherman appears out of context in this narrative detailing in a reminissive manner that has no bearing regarding Trump and clown him like a superhero movie scandal fills the song, thus rendering the entire process more pathetic that a show about politics on American television around midnight. All the while, the actors remain unaffected, though the reality show The ApprenticeNewsweek was published in November 1994 and appears dated by permanents signature, I will wait is it presents at the end or is simply like there’s no characteristic for this person except he’s greedy this society with fierce a capitalism. Which is just shallow and easy.
Sherman is a journalist by nature and those moments in the documentary where it feels like “The Apprentice” and Sherman’s New York Political and Real Estate landscapes from the 70’s are the best. Stan endows young Trump with something resembling, a developing sense of self importance, his willingness to corner Strong’s Roy Cohn into a latrine and cajole him to assist in erecting his famous hotel on 42nd street (who cares about property taxes). Strong out of his own experience embodies that Cohn was a shark and [was] often surrounded by fishes, but also how Cohn perceived young Donald. He makes the mistake of teaching the future President three principles of life and business which i can assure he considers his own and regurgitated them later while working on The Art of the Deal:
Attack, attack, attack.
No, no, no, never confess, always deny.
Claim victory, and never accept defeat.
Both Cohn and Trump’s lives can be easily mapped out on certain business and political practices. However, watching that same wannabe become a farmer at such an early age is always great for cinema. While it is there, although underdeveloped in the script, one can say that as of now, he also employs those three beliefs outside of the office and even in relationships with the family and the girl who turns his eyes one night, Ivana (Maria Bakalova). The Oscar nominated star of the sequel to the first Borat does an excellent job with her all too brief appearances and does not allow herself to be typecast as a baseless glamorous wife like too many in the press tried to do in the 1980s.
“The Apprentice” seems to be well into the course of events but then the narrative shifts to the mid- 1980s, when both Trump and Cohn were still very different people, and this was at the time when the first was starting to be portrayed as ‘a symbol of the hyper capitalism of the Reagan-era’ as he was beginning the construction of Trump Tower. The question is, how the hell does Sherman and Abbasi create time capsules over the formation of something or someone that on every level they seem to be treating as an evil being? How does one go from the prologue of Life with John C. Cheever to the epilogue? This is what we are left with and begs the question of, why should it be anyone’s job to connect those dots? So the story runs Cohn and Donald flipped places with the latter observing the partner die from AIDS and understanding right there that money was not worth to have the learnt apprentice anymore. Why should we appreciate Cohn’s feelings about what he created? It is fair to suspect that perhaps such disposition is dangerous for one’s moral principles.
Abbasi’s humorous strategy tends to be more of a satire rather than actual humor. He applies lazy quirks for nearly all of the second half while the best parts of the film The Cohn, Trump Relationship are forgotten. There are references made to the slogan MAGA and Stan is seen striking the word ‘loser’ and more than once, Alec Baldwin’s interpretation on ‘Saturday Night Live’ comes to mind. Even the more affluent content starts losing its sensibility, statements like ‘in order to prevail, you have to be prepared to perform any act’ come out too conveniently to be excuses for Trump’s catalog of evils. Still many people are ready to go all out and win at all costs. Not everyone, though, ends up becoming Trump.
“What The Apprentice” is ignorant for two hours and the author has the gall to say that this type of scene is the best way to bring that ignorance to a conclusion of sorts, stating there’s no use trying to explain how it comes to this anyways. The young real estate developer with a critical father found a loving new one in Roy Cohn and that clicked. And that, in turn, was to permanently alter the geopolitics of the planet. That’s pretty much it. This seems to be a bit excessive, as it would have come out nicely in a novel in which the author would expound more on the plot and broaden a bit the time frame between the future president’s images of the 70s and the 80s. Rather, the picture quite often does not know what to say about its hero or what one should do with him at present times. It’s far too simplistic to dismiss all of it by saying: “It’s just the way this man was.”
Is this a hilarious take on the American Dream? A scare story on the ways in which the American Dream went wrong? Or a funny documentary about a complete idiot who happened to be in the right men’s room at the right time? It does not seem to want to provide answers to such questions and shows a tendency to exchange them for cheap one liners about capitalism, politics of the day, the institution of a family, marriage, and so forth. Perhaps there is just too much that can be said about Donald Trump for a movie lasting for two hours. I get the impression that by the end credits, there will be even more attempts to unravel the enigma of Donald Trump.
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