We’re living in a serial killer biopic renaissance. The ethics of true crime are always a hot–button topic online, and debates reign eternally on the ethics of having a hot guy play a serial killer.
There’s a similar argument to be made for politicians. Casting Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi and released on Oct. 11, is a choice that capitalizes on Stan’s star power and fanbase; it’ll certainly get more eyeballs on it from more than the policy wonk crowd. The same goes, of course, for the casting of actors like Robert Redford in All The President’s Men. I’m sure Dennis Quaid wants it to be true about himself in Reagan.
The most recent of these is The Apprentice, a movie that follows Donald Trump’s rise to … well, it doesn’t really say. The Apprentice is a movie that wants to be about Donald Trump the man, avoiding at all costs Donald Trump the politician. While watching, one can’t help but be mystified at best about the missing pieces in the story.
If nothing else, The Apprentice is fantastically acted. Sebastian Stan plays against his type as a hot guy as an unhot guy in this film. But the performance of the movie is Jeremy Strong’s glass–closeted Roy Cohn, whose mannerisms are skin crawling, and whose steady deterioration is equal parts difficult and satisfying to watch play out. The two are electric on screen together, immensely watchable and compellingly, convolutedly involved, eternally playing at a weird pseudosexual game of power and one–up–man–ship.
That is, of course, until you remember that the person at the center of that dynamic is Donald Trump.
It’s impossible to watch The Apprentice without feeling one way or another about its very, very overt avoidance of politicization. It feels oxymoronic for a film about a figure who is currently one of the biggest names in global politics, but this apolitical eye is at the core of The Apprentice. It’s not a story of empire or of decline; it’s just the story of a man with some daddy issues making the lives of New Yorkers worse.
The film’s avoidance of any sort of political stance slowly corrodes the watching experience, eating slowly but steadily away at any hope of commentary, or nuance, or some sort of statement. It’s not Reagan’s self–aggrandizing Great Man story, and it’s not All The President’s Men’s valorous depiction of hardworking journalists and unfavorable at best (and largely offscreen) depiction of Nixon. Instead, The Apprentice lives in a bizarre world where Donald Trump can be separated from politics and his influence on it.
That jarring discomfort aches behind the teeth for a while, but jumps straight to the forefront during a scene depicting Ivana Trump’s reported—then recanted—rape accusation against her husband. It’s a moment that comes and goes without much ceremony, and while it could be read as some sort of meta–commentary about the real–world bevy of sexual assault allegations leveled at Trump, it instead exists more as a plot beat—something that happens to the character of Ivana and that never gets touched on again. It’s a floating story element, and if the viewer wasn’t already aware of how hard the film goes out of its way to have an opinion on Trump’s politics and his impact on the country’s culture, they certainly are after that scene.
The thing about a film that doesn’t say much of anything is that there’s a plethora of ways that it can be interpreted—or, less charitably, a plethora of ways that people can co–opt it for their own political gain. There will be people who find moments in The Apprentice that they can use to lionize Trump; there will be people who find moments in it that they can use to call him an evil man. There will even be people whose takeaway will be that Trump was a victim of Cohn’s machinations.
The entertainment media people engage with affects the way they see the world, and the way they see the world reframes the way they engage with entertainment media. Hollywood et al. have faced pressure throughout cinema’s long history to bend to moral demands or political movements—but despite all that, there’s an insistence among so many uncritical viewers of film and television that fiction is apolitical, that art and artist are two entirely different beasts and never the twain shall meet—or that entertainment is a form of escapism that can dance entirely outside the realm of real–world implications.
This is fair, to a certain extent. There are many a fictional murderer I enjoy, and many a fictional cheating storyline I eagerly drink up. One doesn’t take a pro–murder or adultery stance by watching those things play out on screen; most people know that outside the four walls of the TV screen, killing people is bad.
However, it’s hard to see that in the same way when we’re talking about real people. And while art is, and always should be, up for interpretation, it feels pretty odd that a film about a present–day politician tries so hard to just be about a man. Audiences might just wonder why Abbasi wanted to make a movie about such a very big figure with so very little to say.
