The Apprentice

Though the idea is older, the line about a self-made man who worships his creator was first notably used about Horace Greeley. No fewer than three New York publications have a claim on it, but Greeley himself was a creature of the media. He spent time in Congress, helped found the Republican Party, ran for president too, but he was a newspaperman. The Tribune might have merged with the New York Herald a century ago, stopped its presses forty-odd years later, but while it ran it had big impacts. The first paper to be printed on linotype, it counted one Karl Marx among its foreign correspondents. The caricaturist Thomas Nast was among those credited by Ulysses S Grant for helping defeat Greeley's ambitions to the White House.

You may never have heard of him.

You have heard of Donald Trump. That oft used line about self-made men fits him like a tailored suit. He's a creature of media too, tied into New York and politics from the off. The draft riots of Gangs Of New York might have threatened the Tribune's building but the media landscape changed more than the physical one. The Calvin And Hobbes from January 19th, 1986, says it best. The television's response to a question about "...the opiate of the masses" is "...Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet."

You might want to see this though.

Director Ali Abbasi works from a script by Gabriel Sherman. Sherman's film début was as one of six variously credited writers on Independence Day: Resurgence. He's of the New York media landscape though. His book The Loudest Voice In The Room, about Fox News' Roger Ailes (or vice-versa), was adapted into a miniseries starring Russell Crowe. He's worked for Vanity Fair and New York magazines, is married to a ProPublica editor who used to work at The New Yorker. He's no stranger to these streets and stories, but it's not a departure for Abbasi either.

There's something uncanny about the course he charts. It's not a pleasant one, to be clear. There are assaults and abandonments, bad language and worse behaviour. This Trump, however fictionalised, is still our protagonist. To explain is not to excuse, to factor in is not to forgive, but still... Holy Spider had monsters who existed in the cracks between structures in society and the monsters who occupied the institutions rather than the interstices. Border subverted expectations too, and its mixture of the Gothic and the grim makes something of the lines we draw around ourselves and others.

The soundtrack and score are mixed. Not in quality, but tracks by era-appropriate acts like Suicide and The Pet Shop Boys are joined by scoring by Martin Dirkov (Abbasi's previous films, weirdly also Independence Day: Resurgence), and David Holmes and Brian Irvine. Across 20 years we see Trump acquire trappings of wealth and power but they are both in their own way traps.

In The Phantom Menace Yoda explained "Always two, there are. No more, no less". Two is a given. Less so, which is who.

Jeremy Strong is Roy Cohn. Sebastian Stan is Donald Trump. We will see their three letter number plates. Their suits. Their tactics. The ways they work around money and power and the law. The Apprentice isn't just an origin story, a myth. An open hand, an empty Faust. A self-made man at least has a creator to worship. What price to sell one's soul if there's nobody to buy it? Call it ethical ease through equity release. What price not to sell one's soul but to borrow against it? Even without a Hell it's possible to be morally bankrupt.

Isolated assets include the men themselves. I know how easy it is to read this as demonisation and that interpretation is sufficiently facile that there are tweets about it. There's something very specific about how Cohn is framed, how Trump sits alone in a busy club before they meet. Strong is no stranger to this milieu. Before he stalked the corridors of power in Succession he was sweeping them in The Big Short. Sebastian Stan is having a year.

A Different Man is perhaps as skittish in its classification, in how the boundaries between that seen on the reel and that which is real are blurred. That blur is physical too, an air of film and video a haze that transports through its surface, its artificiality. Kasper Tuxen's camera creates something that feels real because it is somewhat intermediated. I'm not sure that hint of television will come through when it is on streaming services. Maybe that distance through difference will become something else, a sense that it's film and not a file. Tuxen's done dozens of shorts, music videos, some for names even I recognise. For Abbasi though, he's made it look like looking at New York in the 1970s, the 1980s.

Trump is of that era. Stan's performance is inevitably informed by the wealth of archive to study. There are moments where the purses are of lips and not lucre, elements of accent, gesture. To portray another person there is a line between expression and impression. Dennis Quaid and the film in which he plays Reagan don't seem to want to commit, relying instead on a vague affability. Stan and his Trump are much more focused, though at times there's a chilling vacancy. It's in the absences that I think The Apprentice is strongest, and its most difficult.

Cohn is dead and so has little recourse to libel. Did he say and do these things? Did he end a life in the way he admits? Did he end his life without admission? Did he experience regret? Need? Weakness? Not for nothing is there a woven epitaph for him that reads "Bully, coward, victim". Elsewhere not black, yellow, red, but red, white, and blue. Trump is still with us. Did he say and do these things? Does it matter in an era of "alternative facts"? If there are "good people on both sides"? If a gift is fake, is the sentiment behind it?

The Apprentice manages in places to elicit sympathy for the unsympathetic. It measures a degree of compassion for those who have abandoned it. It finds room for those who despise weakness, and are weaker for it, and is stronger because of it. In here perhaps are the same fantasies as Dirty Harry, that there is right and it is unfairly bound by the law. That there is something strong in not following the rules. That hypocrisy is someone else's problem, or at least that's what they want you to think. To render your soul in saleable condition and live with it in escrow.