'The Apprentice' Shows Donald Trump As We've...Always Seen Him Before
#293: "The Apprentice," "We Live In Time," "Lonely Planet," "Shakespeare In Love," "Monkey Man"
Edition 293:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Is the world ready for a biopic of Donald Trump? What about an earnest, weepy rom-com with Spider-Man and Yelena from the MCU?? Nobody is ready for a new Netflix rom-com (the com there is generous). In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Millie Bobby Brown’s latest somehow tops all her previous Netflix efforts for dumbest premise.
The Apprentice
It’s 2024, and by now there is no person on the planet whose reputation carries more baggage than Donald Trump. Whether you love him or hate him, the name alone carries with it so much…stuff: memories, thoughts, feelings.
So the hardest part about making a biopic on Trump is that nobody is going to come to the movie objectively, let alone as a blank slate. It doesn’t matter how politically charged the movie is or isn’t (mostly isn’t), people are only going to see in it what they want to see.
That applies to the film’s producers too, apparently. It’s kind of hilarious that a bunch of rich MAGA guys like Dan Snyder helped fund this movie thinking it would help Trump get reelected (seeing the good), only to watch a cut of it before the Cannes Film Festival in May and immediately (seeing the bad) sent a cease and desist letter to try and make sure it never got released.
This past weekend it was released, though you’d be forgiven for not noticing after it rung up just $1.6 million on opening weekend. People received it not with political firestorm on either side of the aisle but rather with a yawn.
Which I suppose was my own reaction to the movie — that I didn’t really want to spend two hours hanging out with Trump.
That level of “Trump fatigue” seems to be pervasive on a new level in 2024. After all, this is the man who practically single-handedly propped up the bottom lines of The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and the rest of the content ecosystem for years because people simply couldn’t get enough of reading about him and watching him (love or hate!). Now it’s like … we already know so much about this guy, we know most of the stories, we understand his shtick. There’s nothing that can surprise us anymore.
In some ways, I feel sorry for the movie. Were it released in 2016, or any of those first four years, I think it would’ve hit with a boom. Perhaps it’s primed to be reclaimed in 20 or 30 years as an under-appreciated masterpiece, explaining this important historical figure to a new generation.
That’s not to say we’re talking about The Social Network here. It doesn’t have Sorkin-sharp dialogue or Fincher-level craft (an impossible standard to compare against), but what the movie does have is two A+ acting performances at the center.
I’ve taken entirely too long to tell you that this movie focuses on Trump’s years from the mid-1970s through to the late-80s, and the “apprentice” the title refers to is not his TV show but rather Trump’s tutelage at the foot of Roy Cohn, a New York-based lawyer and fixer who basically teaches Trump the playbook that he still employs today (three rules: 1) attack attack attack, 2) deny everything, 3) always claim victory).
Jeremy Strong — Kendall “number one boy” Roy from “Succession” — gives what might be the best acting performance I’ve seen this year as Cohn, playing him with both menace and paternal care. He is intense, tenacious, but also has some of that swagger of like an Ari Gold type Hollywood agent. His magnetism is like a furnace that lights up every other actor in a scene with him. He should be preparing an Oscar speech.
And somehow Sebastian Stan had an even harder job, because more people have probably done a Trump impression than any other figure in pop culture history (sorry Elvis), and yet almost all of them are cartoonish and insane. Playing Trump, especially in the 70s and 80s before he went full cheeto-head, is an incredibly hard thing to do, and Stan really delivers in a way that absolutely evokes the man without drifting into caricature.
The story makes grand revelations out of (again) very well-known events, leaving little in the way of suspense or revelation, and overstuffs the story with some side plots that feel like burdensome digressions from the central, incredibly captivating dynamic between Cohn and Trump (more precisely Strong and Stan).
Politically, sure, the movie tries hard to appear neutral. But it also delights in moments of buffoonery (one scene depicts Trump wearing a ridiculous snow skiing costume and then slipping on ice full-on banana peel style), which, in my Los Angeles theater, were received warmly.
The movie even offers its liberal dogwhistle moment, when an AIDS-stricken Cohn realizes he’s created an uncontrollable monster and is left crying into an American flag-themed birthday cake, almost as a premonition for the direction the country is going after the events of the movie (Sorkin himself would’ve been proud of how heavy handed this metaphor was).
The most true thing about Trump over the past decade is that the truth, or should I say his truth, will always be stranger than fiction…and more compelling. Considering he’s still flooding our screens with campaign content for the next few weeks (and after that…who knows) makes it really hard to escape into a the world of a movie with him. Or even want to. I certainly didn’t.
Something New
We Live In Time (Theaters): Hollywood has been trying to recapture the magic of Love Story since 1970, and the weepy doomed romance plot is a pretty nice shortcut to producing waterworks from audiences, especially when you find lead actors as emotionally vulnerable as Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh. This movie is so so earnest, wearing its heart on its sleeve for the entire two hours.
The story has a non-linear organization, jumping around the timeline of the relationship, sometimes jarringly, to serve the purpose (I think) of giving the audience tiny little breaks from the emotional weight of what’s coming at the end.
Yet the most shocking thing, honestly, is seeing an on-screen depiction of a healthy relationship. Garfield and Pugh work through the common struggles of any courtship and eventually parenthood with reasonable conversation and mutual respect. I’m not surprised to see the online rumors (almost certainly false) that the co-stars are dating now, because within the context of the movie, they are acting so rationally and consistent with how they might act in real life that it’s not hard to imagine they are not acting at all.
That’s different than saying they have some other-wordly chemistry, because I’m not sure I’d go that far, but certainly the movie furthers each of their public personas. The most obvious takeaway from this movie is, like, wow I really love Andrew Garfield/Florence Pugh. For two well-established stars who have recently taken a turn in the Marvel machine, it’s best to think of this movie like cinematic crop rotation. You do a movie like this to refresh your image (and, I imagine, your creative impulses) before diving back in for a massive paycheck.
I can definitely support that, as long as it produces movies as watchable as this one!
Lonely Planet (Netflix): It’s been a long while since I had this specific complaint about a bad movie: Lonely Planet is just…lame. Like what was the initial pitch for this movie that got someone to put money behind it? Enough money to land Liam Hemsworth and Laura Dern in the lead roles! Dern stars as an author with writer’s block who goes to a writers’ retreat in Africa (why) and meets Hemsworth, a jock finance bro who is the plus-one of another author. They fall for each other…in the most unearned manner possible, as if they were destined to solely because they were trapped in a romantic movie.
It’s not that it’s incompetent or even amateurish, it’s just so devoid of any ideas that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was written by A.I. or a first year screenwriting student. I’m actually flummoxed by how empty it is. Did no one see drafts of the script or cuts of the movie anywhere in the process? Where are the quality control safeguards?
Something Old
Shakespeare In Love (1998, Max): The reputation of this movie has never really recovered from its Oscar campaign, in which Harvey Weinstein strong-armed the Academy into giving it Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan. A travesty, no doubt, but somewhere along the way angry people forgot about the actual content of the movie, which is still good!
Joseph Fiennes (yes, the brother of Ralph) plays a young, broke Shakespeare who meets his muse (young Gwyneth Paltrow, a great choice) and it inspires him to write “Romeo and Juliet.” The 90s were a crazy time, when you cue up a movie like this and find a supporting cast including Ben Affleck, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Wilkinson, Colin Firth and Judi Dench. And a fun fact I always love telling people is that this movie is directed by John Madden (…ok not that John Madden, although that would be hilarious).
Something To Stream
Monkey Man (Amazon Prime): Back in April I called Monkey Man director/star Dev Patel’s “arrival moment,” but I can’t exactly coronate him off of just $35 million in box office receipts (a modest success against a $10 million budget…emphasis on the modest). Still, more people deserve to watch this class warfare revenge flick where Patel casts himself as a vigilante trying to take down the corrupt ruling class in India.
The story plays out like a comic book (the actual comics, not a comic book movie), and is bolstered by some pretty awesome, John Wick-style action sequences with Patel looking suave as every in the center of the frame (the James Bond in my heart, even if the Broccoli family disagrees).
Trailer Watch: The Electric State
New Millie Bobby Brown Netflix jam about to drop, and once again somehow she’s outdone herself with an even stupider premise, something about robots??
This time she’s got the Russo brothers directing (whose non-Marvel projects have been mostly unwatchable) and co-stars like Chris Pratt as…see if you can imagine this stretch, a smart-talking rogue type, and Giancarlo Esposito as, woah, a mannered villain?!?
Of course, roughly three bajillion people are going to watch this come March.