In light of the recent presidential election, the new film “The Apprentice” holds a great amount of meaning and public interest. The film was set to be a highly controversial piece, and its long awaited release delivered on the discomfort and fascinated reactions it caused in most Americans.
I went into the film with a general knowledge of its premise, but not further background information on the timeline, plot or main ideas. When I finished watching, I was left with a strange feeling of confusion and what felt like a deeper and more frustrating understanding of who Donald Trump is as a person.
The film follows a young, unknown Donald Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) as he works to gain power in the business world of Manhattan. Trump is taken under the wing of powerful attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who gives him the resources to gain enough influence and power to build his brand and empire. Trump marries model Ivana (born Ivana Marie Zelníčková), creating the family image that is tainted in its reality. As the film progresses, the audience watches his power and corruption grow as his humanity slips away.
While the film shares the title of its reality television show predecessor, there has been no confirmation that there is a correlation between the two. Though they are very different types of projects, they share the value of focusing on Trump’s character. The show’s premise was to take aspiring businesspeople and give them an opportunity to win the prize of working under successful businessman Donald Trump, but it was revealed later on that his success was a fallacy exaggerated to be used as a plot device. John D. Miller, NBC’s former chief marketer, wrote in U.S. News and World Report that, “Trump declared business bankruptcy four times before the show went into production, and at least twice more during his 14 seasons hosting.”
The film sparked large amounts of controversy on both sides of the American political spectrum, upsetting most viewers in some form. As I watched, I felt as though my understanding of him changed, the view of him as a powerful politician transforming into someone who was far more human and mundane. When asked about Trump’s humanization in an interview with The Sunday Times, Sebastian Stan responded, “When you’re saying how dare we humanize him…then you have to ask yourself why is it that half of the country loves him so much?”
Screenwriter Gabriel Sherman wanted to elicit the type of audience reaction that I felt, seeing this story as a character investigation.
“In our hyperpolarized culture, in which Trump is either deified or demonized, portraying Trump as human was a radical act. I wrote him as a three-dimensional character with hopes, dreams, fears, and (many) flaws,” Sherman wrote in an article for Vanity Fair.
People are often stuck in their own lenses when viewing those in the public eye, and this film requires the viewer to take away their view of Trump, the politician, and delve into Trump, the businessman.
Trump himself responded incredibly negatively to the film’s first showings, filing cease and desist letters against the movie’s director and writer, and threatening the distribution of the film with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
In a Sunday Times interview, Jeremy Strong commented on Trump’s fury surrounding the film’s release. “If he was so triggered by the film…I just think it makes it more essential for people to see it because of what it has to offer us before we cast a ballot,” he said.
Trump’s response made the project’s journey to the theaters a difficult one, with writer Gabriel Sherman writing in his Vanity Fair article that he was unsure if the project would ever make it to theaters for the American public to see. Sherman had the idea for the movie following the 2016 election, after he had covered Trump’s first presidential campaign as a journalist for New York Magazine. He wanted the film to be non-partisan, so he brought in Ali Abbasi, an Iranian director. I, along with many, assumed that this would be a left-leaning film that fully portrayed Trump as the villain type character that liberals view him as. As I watched, I was surprised by how wrong I was, as the film felt like a separate entity entirely, just as Abbasi had intended.
Abbasi viewed the project as a magnification of Trump’s character, not as a politician but as a person. As a neutral party, he wanted to place Trump in the context of a larger, flawed system.
“This is not a Trump movie…it is a story of a system…a depiction of the American system,” said Abbasi in an interview with The Wrap. We are all aware of the stereotype of the corrupt businessman, and yet it seems as though the cycle of that person holding a great amount of power continues. This flaw in our system is the overarching idea that Abbasi wanted to tackle, commenting on the ways of the American system from an outside perspective.
The film was released right before the election due to the setbacks posed from Trump’s legal threats, but the timing proved to be perfect in the eyes of those involved. “I think we have to start shifting our perspective of Donald Trump from a caricature … and actually really take him seriously, and really look at what he’s saying,” said Stan in an interview with StudioCanal. The film serves as an opportunity for viewers to gain more information on who he was as a person before he created the politician character version of himself, and whether or not he should be trusted with great amounts of power.
As Stan said in The Sunday Times, “human beings have flaws and I think when you’re looking at a person that you’re about to trust to lead the free world you should really understand his flaws and understand where his decisions come from.”
Trump is a polarizing character and has forced people to form very rigid opinions. I know that I hold a certain opinion of who he is, but watching this movie added layers to his character that make me feel as though his actions are more explainable than they seem. We can all be as stubborn as we please, but as we go into the next four years, it is crucial that we open our minds to reaching higher levels of understanding about who has been chosen to lead our country, and how he will go forth with the power he has been given.