Cannes Daily: Trump Film Divides, Delights, Infuriates
'The Apprentice' director angles for a U.S. fall release; Iranian filmmakers dominate discourse. Plus: Today's Jury Grid
Memo to Donald Trump: Whatever you do today while you sit twiddling your thumbs in that chilly New York City courtroom, tell your staff not to include any printouts about that new movie that premiered Monday night at the Cannes Film Festival in the stack of media mentions you like to shuffle through to pass the time.
It will only upset you.
Donald, trust me, you don’t want to know about Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, in which Sebastian Stan plays a younger version of the Donald as he’s mentored in his upward climb to power by notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, as portrayed by Jeremy Strong.
I know your campaign spokesman Steven Cheung has already issued a typically blustery statement, threatening, “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. This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, [it] should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”
Abbasi took the threat in stride, saying at a Tuesday morning press conference, “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” And, after all, Donald, do you really want another court case?
Sure, it might have sounded flattering at first to learn that someone’s made a movie about you. But don’t check out IMDB or you’ll be reminded that there have actually been two movies about the young Barack Obama — 2016’s Barry, about his days as a Columbia University student, and that same year’s Southside with You, about his courtship of Michelle Robinson — and both were mostly laudatory.
Not so The Apprentice. Look, the filmmakers had the gall to borrow their title from the NBC show that established you in the public mind as a business titan and not one who has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy six times. The fact that Stan is famous for playing a Marvel hero, Bucky Barnes, might have appealed to your ego. And he’s got your vocal patterns and mannerisms down without resorting to caricature — a couple of other characters even tell him he reminds them of Robert Redford! But, really, it’s not a flattering portrait, especially as vanity takes over, and the film includes graphic scenes of liposuction and a scalp reduction.
As for Strong’s work as Cohn, it could unnerve you. Cohn is, of course, one of the great villains in American life. Al Pacino won an Emmy for playing him in the HBO version of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and Strong could also be an awards contender for his reptilian take, which is tempered only by a sense of betrayal when he’s abandoned in his final days. (I wonder if Cohn ever haunts you in your dreams the way the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg haunts Cohn in Angels in America?)
Yeah, you can try to dismiss these filmmakers as deranged lunatics, but they’re too smart to be dismissed so easily. Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay shrewdly sprinkles in lines — like “It’s a disgrace” or “He asks nasty questions” — that have become part of your go-to vocabulary as if you are uttering them for the first time. Abbasi’s direction — he previously directed the 2022 serial killer movie, Holy Spider — captures the scuzzy world of New York City real estate where you got your start.
Listen, these folks are dead serious about exposing your origins. Abbasi interrupted the applause at the movie’s premiere to ask rhetorically why a movie about Donald Trump and then, answering his own question, he said, “There is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism. There’s only the messy way. There’s only the banal way. There’s only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level and it’s not going to be pretty.”
Concluding, he said, “It’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”
Now, Donald, if your staff is filling you in about any of this, you’ll probably think Abbasi is taunting you. At his press conference, the Iranian-Danish director did invite you to view the film, saying, “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know? And like I’ve said before, I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening talk and a chat afterwards, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign.”
Of course, you might find some consolation in the fact that The Apprentice hasn’t yet found a U.S. distributor yet. It could be a tough film to market. Those who loathe Trump may not want to give it the time of day, while those who love you will dismiss it as another hit job.
But Abbasi is optimistic, saying, “We have a promotional event coming up called the U.S. election that’s going to help us with the movie. The second debate is going to be Sept. 15, if I remember right, so that’s a good release date for us, I would say.” (The second debate is actually Sept. 10.)
On the other hand, Donald, you may have other options at your disposal. Perhaps you could get your old pal Steven Mnuchin — he used to invest in movies — to buy up U.S. rights and deep-six the film altogether. After all, if all those weeks you’ve been spending in that New York courtroom have taught you anything, it’s that your past campaigns were not above resorting to a little catch-and-kill.
From Our Partners at Screen International
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Reviews
The Apprentice Offers Up a Donald Trump Origin Story
Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong impress in Ali Abbasi’s otherwise lackluster drama. Continue reading
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Vincent Kassel plays a man who has lost his wife, portrayed by Diane Kruger. Continue reading
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The film looks at the career of the exiled South African photographer. Continue reading
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Iranian Filmmakers Are Making Their Presence Felt in Cannes
A key focus will be the May 24 premiere of dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig. Continue reading
Today’s Screen Jury at Cannes
The long-running Screen International Jury Grid is a critical ranking of competition films in Cannes, according to an assembled jury of 12 international film critics, including Screen's reviewers. Click here for today’s full grid and accompanying story, with The Apprentice and Cronenburg’s The Shrouds making their debuts but not approaching the more positive response for such films as The Substance.
