Tag: Jeremy Strong

The Apprentice (2024)

Heavy-handed anti-Trump message is made to almost work by two excellent performances

Director: Ali Abbasi

Cast: Sebastian Stan (Donald Trump), Jeremy Strong (Roy Cohn), Maria Bakalova (Ivana Trump), Martin Donovan (Fred Trump Snr), Catherine McNally (Mary Anne Trump), Charlie Carrick (Fred Trump Jnr), Ben Sullivan (Russell Eldridge), Mark Rendall (Roger Stone), Bruce Beaton (Andy Warhol)

No one has dominated recent global discussion more than Donald Trump. The Apprentice aims to expose how he was formed – inevitably, you can’t move for reviews referring to it as a Supervillain Origin Story – but really, it’s being sung for the choir and I’m not sure it really adds anything to the international conversation. I can’t imagine this film shifting the dial at all (which indeed it didn’t): if you hate Trump (and I am not a fan), it’s gonna confirm everything you think already and then some. If you are a supporter you’ll probably think it’s a shrill hatchet job. Both sides might well agree Abbasi’s film is a little hectoring.

Picking up in the late 70s, and running through the all-consuming Greed-is-Good Reaganite America, The Apprentice charts the friendship between up-and-coming would-be-property-mogul Trump (Sebastian Stan) and ruthless McCarthyite legend lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Cohn takes Trump under this wing, teaching him his three rules for success (always attack, never apologise, always claim victory no matter what). Under this guidance, Trump becomes the figure of bombastic, selfish egotism we see today – while Cohn, afflicted with AIDS, shrinks under his protégé’s shadow.

Watching The Apprentice I was reminded of Oliver Stone’s Nixon – and not in a good way. Stone is no supporter of Nixon, but his film is a surprisingly generous Greek Tragedy which plays fair with the 37^th President, acknowledging his strengths as well as his chronic character flaws. The Apprentice abandons any attempt to do the same by the halfway point. Part of that may well be that Trump is an infinitely more shallow, less complex, less accomplished figure than Nixon. But if The Apprentice had dared to find anything a little deeper in Trump (his complex relationship with his family would have been good for this) it might have had more impact.

Instead, it’s a Faust story where the power balance shifts from Mephistopheles to Faust. At first Cohn is all powerful, tempting Trump with the power and influence to transform him from two-bit rent collector to king of the world. But the more confidence Trump gains, the more he dwarves Cohn. And the more Cohn is slowly eaten away by weakening powers and the AIDS he refuses to acknowledge he has, the smaller and more desperate he seems. It’s almost a succubus tale, with Trump draining Cohn so much he ends the film passing off his mentor’s mantras as his own invention.

The film’s most interesting section by far is it’s opening hour. It’s the only part that presents us with a Trump we don’t know already. In an excellent, Oscar-nominated, performance Sebastian Stan not only captures Trump’s mannerisms he also searches under the man’s shallow surface. Stan makes the young Trump bashful, eager-to-please, over-awed by power and nervous in high society. Seeing a naïve, fragile, uncertain Trump whose father doesn’t love him is genuinely interesting – especially since we all know the cast-iron certainty he has today. It could have done with more of this, trusting us to lay our knowledge of the man today on top.

The main factor that really lifts The Apprentice our two leads. Both Stan and Strong find an emotional depth and insight in their characters (while never absolving them) that makes them more three-dimensional than Abassi’s film wants to make them. Jeremy Strong is particularly superb (and also Oscar-nominated) as Cohn. Whipper-thin, tanned, his head aggressively jutting forward he resembles a sort of angry ferret. Strong brilliantly captures the vicious contradictions in Cohn – the Jewish antisemite, the gay homophobe – and his demonic, but Strong brilliantly unpeels Cohn’s weakness. Trump absorbs all Cohn’s vices (and then some), but none of his few virtues – personal loyalty, patriotism. Strong never makes Cohn sympathetic, but also displays his pain, unhappiness and possibly even guilt, as he realises this uncaring monster will even consume his creator. (Strong’s final scene of the dying Cohn confronting Trump’s indifference one last time is superbly played).

Abbasi’s film is well-made – the photography frequently degraded to appear like grainy camcorder footage – and its filmed with a handheld, pacey immediacy. It captures the excess Trump lives in, with its golden surfaces and more-is-more bling. All of this is aimed at exposing the future President as overwhelmingly self-occupied, amoral and cruel, interested only in himself and seeing morals. None of that is a major surprise and Abbasi is a little too delighted with pricking Trump’s fragile ego, portraying him as impotent, sniggering at his hair loss and weight gain (although this allows a neat gag, with Trump telling a doctor the body has a limited amount of energy so exercise is actually bad for you – something he refuses to accept is not true).

Trump’s treatment of Cohn is the tip of the iceberg of the depths of Trump’s personal behaviour the film gleefully shows. Trump’s penchant for self-aggrandising speeches, his kneejerk homophobia about AIDS (his fear of catching it by touch leads to him fumigating items Cohn has touched), his indifference about relationships (swindling his father and dropping his alcoholic brother) all get ample coverage. He pursues Ivana (a very good Maria Bakalova) with a passion then, having got her, treats her only as something he can brag about (particularly her ‘improved’ breasts), becomes jealous of her growing fame. It overplays its hand by dramatising the disputed rape of Ivana by Trump – a crime so serious you feel it should be beyond question and not be treated as part of a parade of personal faults, never to be referenced again.

But that’s because The Apprentice never knows when to stop. If it had the courage to expand its opening hour, to explore the malign effect of Cohn on this ambitious young man, with a coda showing the fall of Cohn in the shadow of the Trump we recognise – it would have been a more interesting film. Instead, it seems designed to hammer home a political agenda rather than provide drama or insight making it more heavy-handed and obvious than it needed to be. Aside from the two marvellous performances from Stan and Strong, there is actually very little really here.

The Big Short (2015)

An all-star cast juggle dollars, acronyms and lots of shouting in McKay’s smart but heartless film

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Christian Bale (Michael Burry), Steve Carell (Mark Baum), Ryan Gosling (Jared Vennett), Brad Pitt (Ben Rickert), John Magure (Charlie Geller), Finn Wittrock (Jamie Shipley), Hamish Linklater (Porter Collins), Rafe Spall (Danny Moses), Jeremy Strong (Vinny Daniel), Marisa Tomei (Cynthia Baum), Tracy Letts (Lawrence Fields), Melissa Leo (Georgia Hale), Karen Gillan (Evie)

We all experienced the financial crisis of 2007 but very few of us actually understood it: above all, perhaps, what the hell actually happened and why. That’s what McKay’s film – somewhere between drama, satire, black comedy and tongue-in-cheek infomercial – tries to resolve. Adapting a book by leading financial journalist Michael Lewis, The Big Short charts the whys and wherefores of the collapse, by focusing on the money men who saw the signs of the impending crash and bet against the booming economy.

Those men (and they are all men of course) are played by a series of actors enjoying themselves thoroughly playing larger-than-life characters who it’s never entirely clear if we are supposed to empathise with, sympathise with, cheer on or stand aghast at while they make fortunes from the ruin of others. I’m not sure the film does either though.

Christian Bale is the eccentric hedge fund manager whose analysis predicts the crash and takes eye-watering investment charges that will pay off thousands of times over when the crash comes. Ryan Gosling is a banking executive who understands that analysis and robs in Steve Carrell’s hedge fund manager to similarly invest to cash in (Carrell’s character, for all his misanthropic oddness is the only one truly outraged at the corruption in the system that will lead to the collapse). Brad Pitt is the retired trader roped in for “one more job” by young traders Finn Wittrock and John Magure to make their own bets against the house. They too will eventually realise the huge impact this will have on people – but are powerless to get anyone to listen as they try and warn against the pending disaster.

McKay’s film, with its tightly-controlled but surprisingly effective off-the-cuff feel (it’s stuffed with neatly edited jokes, straight to camera addresses and a constant running commentary from the characters on the accuracy – or otherwise – of outlandish moments), may sometimes have the air of a slightly smug student film, but what it does well is explain the financials. If you were unsure about what CDOs, AAA ratings, Quants, credit default swops and sup-prime mortgage were before the start, you’ll have a much better idea later. Neat inventions describe this: from narration, to graphics, to Jenga blocks to famous people (Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez among others) popping up to glamorously put things in other contexts.

The Big Short does this sort of thing rather well. Sure, it’s got a “lads” feeling to it – there is no “for the girls” equivalent to Margot Robbie in a bath explaining sub-prime mortgages – and the entire dialogue and pace of the film has a frat-house wildness that I suppose does reflect the tone of many of these financial institutions, which were little better than sausage parties. But it presents its ideas nicely and has some good jokes. The verité style McKay goes for is more studied than it natural – and it’s hard not to escape the feeling that the film is very, very pleased with itself, so much so that it’s not a surprise both his follow-up films the dreadful Vice and the shrill Don’t Look Up double down to various degrees on the slightly smug, self-satisfied liberalism here that sees those in power as corrupt, greedy, fools or all three and everyone else as innocent victims.

Where the film is less certain is exactly how it feels about its central characters. In other words, it doesn’t always turn the same critical eye on these people profiting from a disaster that will lead to millions losing their homes (the millions are represented by a single immigrant family). Brad Pitt may reprove his young charges from celebrating gains that will be the losses of millions of others. Steve Carrell gets several lines berating the callous, short-sighted greed of the banks. Christian Bale’s character is appalled by the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” relationship between banks, investment ratings agencies and insurance companies, all working together to keep artificial profits up. But the film still wants us to celebrate as these plucky outsiders and weirdoes clean out the house and carry home cartloads of cash while the casino burns down.

Basically, the film is all good fun but gives us little to actually care about. It’s highly influenced by the gonzo macho representation of this world Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street gave us, but far less skilled than that film in presenting its players as the childish, amoral vacuums they are. Furthermore, it does far less to really look at the impact of what it’s doing: in fact, it spends so long delighting in how it tells the story, it doesn’t show us what happens. It dwells at the end on abandoned trading floors and closed banks, like the fall of the Roman Empire, but finds no time at any point to hear from a real person who lost their home.

Perhaps because the real impacts are too depressing – and would have made it impossible to feel the triumphal buzz the film wants from seeing its heroes vindicated and the smug assholes we’ve seen from the banks get egg on their face. It might have felt a lot less funny if we had seen even a closing montage of the real victims and the human impact.

It’s where The Big Short falls down and why it feels in the end like a student film made on a huge budget. It nods its head at real mature themes but actually isn’t really interested in them at all.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Sacha Baron Cohen leads a campaign for justice in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7

Director: Aaron Sorkin

Cast: Eddie Redmayne (Tom Hayden), Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Richard Schultz), Mark Rylance (William Kunstler), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Bobby Seale), Michael Keaton (Ramsey Clark), Frank Langella (Judge Julius Hoffman), John Carroll Lynch (David Dellinger), JC MacKenzie (Tom Foran), Alex Sharp (Rennie Davis), Ben Shenkman (Leonard Weinglass), Jeremy Strong (Jerry Rubin), Kelvin Harrison Jnr (Fred Hampton), Noah Robbins (Lee Weiner), Daniel Flaherty (John Froines), Caitlin Fitzgerald (Daphne O’Connor)

Aaron Sorkin’s work celebrates the great liberal possibilities of America. Is there any writer who has more faith in the institutions of the American state – while being so doubtful of many of the actual people running those institutions? You can imagine Sorkin sees more than a bit of himself in Abbie Hoffman, jocular prankster and wordsmith, angry at his country in the way only someone who really loves it can be. This idea is at the heart of Sorkin’s biopic of the trial of seven activists for promoting violence in the build-up to the Democratic convention of 1968 in Chicago.

Vietnam is in full swing with young men dying in their thousands to defend a cause many are starting to believe isn’t worth it. Nixon has just been elected – and his government wants to make an example of these left-wing, hippies he believes are drowning out “the silent majority”. Student leaders Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), hippie activists Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), and pacifist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) are arraigned in court for conspiracy to incite a riot, facing a ten year prison sentence. Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who wasn’t in Chicago at the time, is thrown in to make them look more threatening. With radical lawyer William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) in their corner, the defendants deal with a slanted case from the government, being backed all the way by the judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) who can’t hide his contempt for them.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 feels like it’s on the cusp of making a grand statement about the rights and liberties of Americans, at a time of great civil unrest. With the country more divided now than it’s ever been since the events of the film, this should be a timely message. But somehow the film doesn’t quite manage to deliver it. There is too much going on – an attempt to cover divisions in the left and counter-culture, the events in Chicago in 1968, the trial, clashes outside of court – it’s almost as if Sorkin the director has failed to marshal Sorkin the writer into making a clear and coherent thematic point. Instead the film becomes a chronicle of shocking courtroom events, affecting, but not as earth-shaking as it should be.

Part of this is the fragmented script. An occasional device is used, whereby Hoffman turns the events of the trial into a lively stand-up routine at some unspecified future point. This is a pretty neat idea as a framing device – however it only pops up at odd moments rather than giving a spine to the film (as well as missing the chance to filter events through the perception of one member of its sprawling cast). You end up thinking it’s just Sorkin the writer coming up with a way of giving us information Sorkin the director can’t work out how to do visually.

This tends to affect a lot of the stuff outside of the courtroom. Sorkin’s dialogue is surprisingly plodding here, too often ticking the boxes or establishing backstory and motivation that will play out later. He has his moments and his gift for capturing revealing details make for brilliantly inspired speeches and dialogue riffs that reveal acres of character while feeling very light. But, considering what he is capable with (and could have done with this material) it feels like autopilot.

That’s the problem here: it’s a little too pedestrian. Only an argument between frustrated liberal Hayden and his lawyer Kuntsler captures something of the dynamic pace of Sorkin at his best. Other scenes – such as an out of courtroom scene between decent just-doing-my-job prosecutor Richard Schulz (a low-key but very good Gordon-Levitt) and Hoffman and Rudin – are a little too on-the-nose in making their points about liberty, truth and justice.

The strongest moments by far are in the courtroom – and the true-life staggering lack of proper procedure followed there. The film is rightly angry, without tipping too much into outright preaching. It’s shocking to see how little the rights of the defendants were respected. Much of this came from the attitude of the judge, Julius Hoffman: a traditionalist, his contempt for the defendants clear throughout, handing out contempt of court charges like sweeties. Frank Langella stands out as a man so convinced of his own morality – and so locked into his own certainty about right and wrong – that he is completely unaware many of his rulings are biased and is deeply hurt at being accused of racial imbalance, while having the only black defendant literally bound and gagged.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is superb as Bobby Searle, the Black Panther leader furious at being roped into the trial. Searle loudly – and vigorously – protests the trial has not been delayed to allow his lawyer to attend and that he has been refused (consistently) by the judge his right to represent himself. The treatment of him is shocking and appalling. But it feels like no attempt is made to put this in wider context either of civil rights at the time or in America since. And that feels like a major miss. We’re only a few degrees from the same effectively happening today.

This is part of the film’s general problem in finding its real focus, or wider context. I suspect its heart is probably in the views expressed by Hoffman on the stand – particularly those around not having his thoughts on trial before – but this film is too scatter-gun.

What the film does do well is with the quality of its performances. Sorkin may be a rather a visually flat director – his shooting of the convention riots completely fails to conceal the lack of budget – but he encourages great work from actors. Redmayne and Cohen give skilled performances as the acceptable and radical faces of left-wing politics. Strong is wonderful as a hippie with a firm sense of right and wrong, while Carroll Lynch is great as a pacifist driven to the edge. Mark Rylance excels as radical lawyer Kunstler, softly spoken but passionate, who brings fire to proceedings.

It’s a shame though that The Trial of the Chicago 7 settles for mostly being a walk-through of the trial. An attempt to really capture a sense of the deeper politics gets lost, and the failure of the film to really draw parallels with today or place these events in their wider context feels like a missed opportunity. Even the film’s end captions don’t give you as much information as you would hope – especially telling considering its abrupt ending. A well-meaning effort, but a middle-brow film.