A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, June 9, 2026

The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice

Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Martin Donovan, Maria Bakalova, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall. Screenplay: Gabriel Sherman. Cinematography: Kasper Tuxen. Production design: Aleksandra Marinkovich. Film editing: Olivier Bugge Coutté, Olivia Neergaard-Holm. Music: Martin Dirkov. 

Ali Abbasi's movie The Apprentice doesn't have a third act because we're living it. It just ends, with the future a glint in Donald Trump's eye, and whether it will be a tragedy or a comedy remains to be seen. Trump is played splendidly by a porked-out Sebastian Stan, who deserved the Oscar nomination he received for not making such a familiar character into a collection of mannerisms. Stan's Trump is vicious but vulnerable, easy prey for a reptile like Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong with the sinister greed of his character in Succession turned up to 11. By focusing on the relationship between Trump and Cohn, Gabriel Sherman's screenplay becomes a reversal of fortune story, with Trump rising and Cohn falling when Frankenstein loses control of his Creature. The film is at its best in the first half, portraying the shady real estate dealing in 1970s New York City with the relish shown by Scorsese and Coppola in their gangster sagas. It's less successful at giving us a sense of the family background that bred the narcissism and megalomania of the Trump we know today, with only a few glimpses into his relationship with his father, played by Martin Donovan. Sherman's depiction of Trump's sexual cruelty and vanity, including his alleged liposuction and scalp reduction, is drawn from his marriage to and divorce from Ivana (Maria Bakalova), but these scenes stand out oddly from the story of how he rose to power. There will probably never be a successful biopic that gives us the complete Donald Trump, but The Apprentice is a good rough draft of one.  


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