GROSS DISTRACTION - The Apprentice - midtown mendacity, downtown depravity
Trump derangement syndrome has not yet peaked.
THE APPRENTICE, director ALI ABASSI, cast JEREMY STRONG, SEBASTIAN STAN, MARIA BAKALOVA production SCYTHIA FILMS, 2024, 123 MINUTES.
There are various tensions here. To begin with, The Apprentice can’t make up its mind if it’s a hip, transgressive study of American decadence or a mid-brow made-for-TV biopic - for various reasons it’s a little more of the latter than is ideal.
One of these tensions is in the movie’s address of its target audience. In this audience - probably making up a majority of those who’ll see it, let’s face it - there are many sufferers from Trump derangement syndrome for whom the only acceptable portrait of Trump and his origins at this point would be one that nails him as a psychopathic-narcissist-fascist and a threat to democracy. No version of Trump that attempted to historicise him or, God forbid, to suggest he might be less different from his political contemporaries than we think, could possibly do.
For this group of committed Trump haters, the movie is a little too gentle on the man, a little too interested in his early vulnerabilities; his curiosity about homosexual lifestyles and his awkwardness with the ladies. The soft-skinned Trump of The Apprentice is the wrong Trump for this group.
So Ali Abassi and his backers found themselves in an awkward position. There was obviously some appetite for this story but not in the form he really wanted to tell it. And I think it’s evident that the film Abassi wanted to make would have been a better one. I have a strong sense that what he wanted to do was to take us on a thrilling, vertigo-inducing, lateral ride through the Roy Cohn universe, the midtown Gomorrah he occupied and partially invented. In this film - the unmade film that I speculate exists in Abassi’s head - Trump would have been a secondary figure, billed equally alongside a glittering cast that would have included Gore Vidal, Barbara Walters, Bill Buckley, Cardinal Spellman, some Kennedys, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Andy Warhol, Henry Kissinger and many more willowy young men…
(The movie's publicists have a story about how hard it's been to get the thing funded because of its hostility to Trump. Nobody believes this).
But because that film could not be made, we wind up with this one, with its compromised analysis of Trump as a monster implausibly made from scratch by Roy Cohn - his raw material a delicate, damaged, curious, uptight rent collector from Queens.
There are topographic tensions too. Roy Cohn’s decadence - his malevelence - is all midtown. His club - it’s not named in the movie but it’s Le Club, an elite hangout modelled on a French disco - is on East 55th. The place apparently had a kitsch faux-baronial style: crossed swords and a huge tapestry on the wall. It was called at the time “a French playboy’s dream of the ultimate seduction pad.” Cohn was an avant-garde libertine so he relished its trashy distance from the older, more staid New York clubs of his father’s generation.
But this movie wants it both ways. Midtown cocaine swank - Vanderbilts, Kennedys, Henry Ford II (in the movie we meet George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees and Si Newhouse, Condé Nast heir, both Le Club regulars and friends of Cohn) but also the darker heroin glamour of downtown. On the soundtrack you’ll hear Suicide - probably the most downtown act that ever existed - and Baccara - impeccable Euro-disco icons who would have vaporised if they’d travelled South of 14th Street. What draws the two districts - the two belief systems - together is the tragedy of AIDS which brutally cuts through Cohn’s happy group and ultimately through the man himself.
Trump and Cohn, of course, are from the outer boroughs. Both aspired to Manhattan and conquered the island in their own ways. They converged in midtown because it was the absolute epicentre of American wealth in this period. And, once installed in Manhattan, both adopted the standard elite contempt for the bridge and tunnel crowd. To this day, Trump will put his name to developments in Atlantic City, in Florida, Panama, Ireland, Dubai… but not in Queens.
Andy Warhol appears, inevitably (when he showed up I realised I’d been assumung he’d be along in a minute). He’s an odd twin to Trump. Both stand apart from the orgy they seem to have accidentally attended - both observe, both learn. Warhol is a bridge figure here. His Factory pinged around between midtown locations, he haunted (and documented) Studio 54 but his floating family of artists and musicians and invented celebrities claimed the neighbourhoods below 14th, the neighbourhoods Cohn and Trump wouldn’t have touched - not least because all those punks and video artists and deviants had been drawn in from the suburbs and the provincial towns too.
There are other tensions: the thrilling moral vacuum of Manhattan in the seventies and eighties glows red against the substantially more uptight climate of social conformity and disapproval that prevails in present-day liberal America. It’s a head-spinning Roman Empire situation: Trump acquired his power and influence via the louche, coke-fueled, ethically contingent midtown elite that centred on Roy Cohn but somehow now leads an unlikely alliance of evangelicals, pensioners, industrial workers, radicalised RV-owners and hyper-capitalist ghouls to almost certain victory over a liberal rump that seems to have defeated itself. I have no idea how to rationalise all this.
In The Apprentice there’s a kind of relish for the unrestrained and unhinged amorality of Cohn and his crew - and even for the more gauche status-seeking of Trump. Abbasi finds something attractive in these apparently liberated figures, in their freewheeling rejection of norms, their single-mindedness and their absolute ownership of their city and their world.
Next week, I promise, we’re back onto the GROSS timeline with 1957’s top-grossing movie The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Spend about ten minutes googling Roy Cohn and you’ll learn that the screenplay for this movie is essentially a mash-up of three or four articles from Vanity Fair, the Daily Beast and New York Magazine.
Cohn’s legendary townhouse - a combination office, home and orgy venue - which features in the film, is strictly just North of midtown on East 68th Street. Sue me.
The townhouse was sold for $3.7M after Cohn’s death in 1987 - but the IRS took all the money. Cohn would never have allowed that.
Abassi’s previous film, Holy Spider, is on Mubi via Amazon Prime. I’ve not seen it so it’s now on my watchlist.
This review and others are on my Letterboxd.