Controversial Donald Trump movie ‘The Apprentice’ depicts him as rapist (original) (raw)
CANNES, France — Had a movie titled “The Apprentice” about a young Donald Trump’s rise to power premiered in America — during an election year in which said protagonist is the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president — one imagines there might have been protests and police in riot gear.
Instead, this Monday evening at the Cannes Film Festival, the film received the usual reverential treatment: a gala audience in gowns and tuxedos and star Sebastian Stan posing for photos on the red carpet. (Jeremy Strong, who plays the ruthless lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, is on Broadway; during the eight-minute standing ovation, Iranian Danish director Ali Abbasi held up a still photo of the actor in his dressing room with his fingers in a peace sign.)
The film follows Trump in his years as a New York real estate mogul, as he strikes up an almost filial relationship with Cohn (and then abandons him as Cohn contracts AIDS), and falls in and out of love with his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”).
Going into the premiere, the main questions swirling around the movie seemed to be about tone. Did the presence of Bakalova mean that this was going to be a biting satire? (The Cannes party invite, for instance, says, “If you’re indicted, you’re invited,” which is a line Strong’s Cohn says in the film.)
Or would it be a dark look into Trump’s power grabs and predatory behavior? After all, the screenplay is from Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman, and Abbasi’s last Cannes film, 2022’s “Holy Spider,” is about a serial killer targeting sex workers in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad.
When the lights rose, the applause was instant and robust, with Cate Blanchett and Cynthia Erivo somehow leading the charge down in the orchestra seats near Abbasi and Stan. There had been spots of laughter, especially during moments of physical comedy, like when Trump slips on ice while courting Ivana and boastfully telling her he knows how to ski. But, by and large, it is a very dark and chilling origin story.
Filmmaker Ali Abbasi debuted his movie, "The Apprentice," which portrays a young Donald Trump, at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21. (Video: AP)
Stan’s Trump is not a clown but a vicious “killer,” as the character categorizes his ambition. In details that seem to be based on a 1990 divorce deposition from Ivana Trump, we see him go under the knife, in gory detail, to get liposuction and a scalp reduction surgery, as a solution to his growing love handles and bald spot.
And we watch when, as Ivana also alleged in that deposition, Trump pushes her to the floor of their home during an argument and rapes her. (Ivana’s testimony had brought the concept of marital rape into mainstream American conversation at the time, but she recanted her statements about it in 2015.)
He’s also depicted receiving oral sex from a topless blonde in Atlantic City while married.
“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers. This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” said Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign communications director.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Abbasi personally invited Trump to a private screening. The director also took the threat of legal action in stride: “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people. They don’t talk about his success rate, though,” he said. The film does not yet have a U.S. distributor though Abbasi is hoping for a mid-September release to coincide with the second presidential debate. “We have a promotional event coming up called the U.S. election that’s going to help us with the movie.”
As they were making the film, Abbasi told the crowd at the premiere, he had so many people question why he would choose Trump as his subject matter, or why he didn’t wrap up what he wanted to say about the world in an allegory about the American Revolution or the Second World War.
“But the point is there is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism,” he said. “There’s only the messy way … there’s only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, on its own level, and it’s not going to be pretty, but I think … that the good people have been quiet for too long. So I think it’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”
Later on, at a party celebrating his new film, Abbasi told The Washington Post: “He’s a complex character. I think anyone who thinks Donald Trump is stupid or banal or superficial is gravely mistaken. I think a lot of my liberal friends think that because he doesn’t speak as eloquently as Barack Obama, he’s dumb and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
He continued: “He has a very intuitive, actual ability to understand the masses. The Donald Trump in the movie is a construct, you know? I can call it a persona. And I can’t say that I decoded him.”
Early griping about the film, from the select few who’d seen it before the premiere, centered on how favorably Trump comes across in the first half. Stan plays him as a cocky, endearing kid, eager to earn his emotionally withholding father’s approval by building the biggest, most gaudy buildings in New York.
Determined to build his own legacy on the skyline of a city that was crumbling and emptying out in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump befriends Cohn, who helps the Trump family out when the Justice Department sues them for discriminating against Black rental applicants to their buildings. Cohn was the one who came up with the idea to countersue the government for $100 million.
Almost as soon as they meet, Cohn is teaching Trump life lessons that still seem to be ones he lives by — and that he laid out in his book “The Art of the Deal”:
Attack, attack, attack. (“If someone comes at you with a knife, you hit them with a bazooka,” Stan’s Trump later says.)
Admit nothing and deny everything.
Never admit defeat.
“I thought that the director’s voice was incredibly bold, and it was a funny take but also incredibly impactful,” said Michelle J. Li, a 27-year-old costume designer from New York, outside the theater. “When you see him portrayed as a human, it makes all these wild choices that we know him to have made even more [frightening].”
“It’s a lot easier to write off monsters as if they’re a fable,” said her friend Reece Feldman, 25, who works in digital marketing for film. “But when they’re depicted as people, you realize that their choices come from something within as opposed to just like a storybook [evil].”
Behind the scenes, though, Variety reports that the film has been embroiled in a vicious legal battle with one of its investors, the billionaire former owner of the Washington Commanders, Daniel Snyder.
According to the trade paper, Snyder — who is a friend of Trump’s and donated 1.1milliontohisinauguralcommitteeandTrumpVictoryFundin2016and1.1 million to his inaugural committee and Trump Victory Fund in 2016 and 1.1milliontohisinauguralcommitteeandTrumpVictoryFundin2016and100,000 to his 2020 campaign — invested in the film through Kinematics. The production company, founded by actor-director Mark H. Rapaport, has made only four films so far, and most of them are horror.
Per Variety, Snyder believed the film would be a flattering portrayal of Trump. But, according to the outlet: “Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February and was said to be furious. Kinematics’ lawyers were enlisted to fight the release of ‘The Apprentice,’ and the cease-and-desist letters began flying.”
Kinematics president Emanuel Nuñez confirmed to Variety that his company had tried to stop the release but that it was a result of creative disagreements between the company and the filmmakers and had nothing to do with Snyder.
Snyder’s attorney John Brownlee did not respond to an email from The Post seeking comment.
Nicki Jhabvala and Maeve Reston contributed to this report.
This article has been updated to include a statement from Donald Trump’s campaign communications director, as well as remarks from a Tuesday news conference.
clarification
Jeremy Strong, as Roy Cohn, says, “If you’re indicted, you’re invited” in the film. It is not written on an invitation in the film. This article has been corrected.