Autumn is traditionally the time when more thoughtful and serious films start to make their appearance in multiplexes, films that invite one to reflect on the deep questions of life. Of course, there's always a place for counter-programming, movies intended to appeal to another audience – in this case, more frivolous and light-hearted films, pure escapist entertainment.

With this in mind, let us turn our attention to Ali Abbasi's new film The Apprentice, a satirical black comedy looking back into fairly recent American history. Despite this, it is billed as a Canadian-Irish-Danish co-production – possibly it takes an outsider's eye to bring a new perspective to the culture it depicts. Or possibly the film is just a bit too far-fetched to appeal to most of the major American studios.

The film is set over a fifteen-year period between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, mostly in New York. The main character is a young businessman named Donald Trump, played by Marvel mainstay Sebastian Stan. Trump is ambitious and a bit unworldly and naive, somewhat in the shadow of his domineering father Fred (Martin Donovan); he is very proud of becoming the youngest-ever member of a millionaires' social club. But his plan to open a swanky new hotel in a part of the city filled with sex workers has run into trouble, not least because the family is being taken to court over suggestions of racist business practices.

Riding to Donald's rescue comes formidable lawyer and operator Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who not only makes the case go away through rather unorthodox and questionable methods, but takes young Trump under his wing and begins to tutor him in how to become successful at business and life in general – his guiding principles being always to go on the offensive (and few people master the art of offensiveness quite as well as Donald Trump), never to admit to wrongdoing, and always to claim victory.

Donald is a quick study, wooing and eventually wedding Czech model Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova), while his real estate empire continues to grow apace. Soon the name Trump is appearing on new projects all over New York and beyond and Donald is becoming a celebrity in his own right. But is there a touch of Prince Hal and Falstaff in the relationship between Trump and Cohn, the young golden boy destined to reject his master? Or is it more a case of Frankenstein and his creation, with Cohn not entirely understanding just what he has unleashed on the world?

Well, thank God it's only a movie, ha ha. Ha. One of America's most prominent convicted felons and former game-show hosts has, with a comforting sense of inevitability, denounced The Apprentice as 'a cheap, disgusting, and politically defamatory hatchet job' made by 'human scum'. Which, depressingly (although, I suspect, not nearly depressingly enough), is pretty much business as usual in the modern world: the people around the real-world Donald Trump (inasmuch as such a concept can be said to actually exist) have tried to get the film blocked from a US release, and one Trump backer (possibly not one of the intellectual elite of the gang, but who knows) actually contributed money to fund the film, believing it would be a puff piece celebrating the origins of the Golden (or at least orange-hued) One.

The least you can say about The Apprentice is that it has made it into cinemas in time to potentially have an impact on next week's little ballot, which is more than you can say for the stop-Trump films of 2020, most of which got nobbled by the pandemic (Pestilence looking out for a colleague, perhaps, though which of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse Trump is the envoy for is still unclear: probably not Famine, anyway). But will it make any difference? Probably not: real-world Trump is such a polarising figure that one would anticipate that most electors will already have made their minds up one way or the other.

So we are left with the film itself, which is pretty entertaining stuff built around the archetypal story-structure of the student surpassing the master, rather to the latter's surprise. This is competently handled – Trump initially seems relatively sympathetic, and Cohn a ruthless monster, but by the end of the film I did find myself feeling somewhat sorry for the ailing mentor. Stock footage and old music works the usual trick of evoking New York City in the seventies and eighties, bringing with it echoes of other films – there's a trace of Wall Street here, and the depiction of the Trump clan perhaps owes something to The Godfather too.

And yet, if you compare it to a film like Vice (one of the most spectacular attempted takedowns of a politician in recent years), The Apprentice never completely catches fire, despite the wealth of material available to it and, one would hope, the urgency of its mission to unveil Trump's origins. You can go two ways with a film about Trump, obviously – the easy furrow would be to go all-out with the gonzo black comedy of someone like him becoming a byword for wealth and success and acquiring genuine power and celebrity along the way. The film kind of flirts with this idea – there are some funny moments scattered throughout it.

But it also seems to be attempting the trickier but more rewarding approach, which is to treat Trump as a genuine human being rather than a joke-shop monster, and investigate where he came from and how he became the way he is. This is, as you would expect, less crowd-pleasing and arguably less successful, too. The movie depicts Donald's marital rape of his first wife (which must have involved a long conversation with the lawyers), but otherwise it seems cautious about making too many accusations of real-world wrong-doing. The rest of the Trump family, particularly Fred Sr., arguably get a very easy ride: the finger of blame for Donald Trump becoming an egotistical megalomaniac is pointed squarely at Cohn, letting everyone else off the hook.

Well, at the risk of sounding like Boris Johnson, nemo repente fuit turpissimus. If The Apprentice is less than wholly successful as a film and a polemic, it's still eye-opening and revealing, with a couple of really strong performances from Stan and Young (if the election goes the way the bookies are predicting, presumably Stan and Abbasi will be two of the first people stuffed into the back of a van, never to be seen again). Entertaining, too, for the time being at least. Whatever happens, we can't say we weren't warned.

Also Showing. . .

. . . from the daughter of the director of Hawk the Slayer, it's Venom: The Last Dance, another entry in Ye Editor's favourite genre. Tom Hardy once again plays both the hapless everyman Eddie Brock and the alien parasite he shares his body with. This time around it turns out that Hardy has accidentally contrived to invent the key to some extra-dimensional prison holding 'Knull, the god of darkness' (Andy Serkis) and ends up being chased around by alien monsters trying to get it off him.

That's about it, plotwise: this is another one of those Sony superhero movies which manages to feel like it was made twenty years ago, in the bad old pre-Marvel Studio days. You could probably have quite a good time, if you go to see it with a friend and compare notes with them at the end about which plot holes you've managed to spot, or if being treated like a moron is your kind of thing. On the one hand this looks very much like the last film in the series; on the other it ends with clear suggestions that further episodes will be forthcoming. This sort of incoherence is fairly representative. Hawk the Slayer is probably a better film.

Awix

04.11.24 Front Page

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