Martin Donovan – Movie Musings

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.

Comic-drama about business collapse wants to The Social Network but lacks its deft touch and humanity

Director: Matt Johnson

Cast: Jay Baruchel (Mike Lazaridis), Glenn Howerton (Jim Balsillie), Matt Johnson (Doug Fregin), Rich Sommer (Paul Stannos), Michael Ironside (Charles Purdy), Martin Donovan (Rick Brock), Michelle Giroux (Dara Frankel), Saul Rubinek (John Woodman), Cary Elwes (Carl Yankowski)

“We’ll be the phone people had before they had an iPhone!” I’ve always found successful products that collapsed overnight fascinating. The Blackberry tapped into something people didn’t even realise they wanted: a phone that combines a computer and pager, a status symbol that told everyone you were a Master of the Universe. It was the product everyone wanted – until Steve Jobs announced the iPhone that did everything the Blackberry did better. It should be material for an entertaining film – but Blackberry isn’t quite it.

The film is set up as a classic Faust story. Our Faust is Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), co-founder and CEO of Research in Motion, a tiny Canadian business with an idea for lovingly crafted cellular devices. Our Mephistopheles is Jim Balsille (Glenn Howerton), an aggressive blowhard businessman who sees the potential – and knows he can sell it the way the timid Lazaridis never could. The angel on Faust’s shoulder is co-founder Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson), who worries the quality-and-fun parts of the business will be sacrificed. Nevertheless, Mephistopheles tempts Faust into partnership and they turn Blackberry into a huge business destined to all fall apart.

Blackberry desperately wants to be The Social Network. What it lacks is both that film’s wit and sense of humanity. It’s a film trying too hard all the time, always straining to be edgy. You can see it in its hand-held, deliberately soft-focus filming style, the camera constantly shifting in and out of blur. (Watching after a while I genuinely started to feel uncomfortable, with a wave of motion sickness nausea.) It goes at everything at one hundred miles an hour, but never manages to make its depiction of a company bought low by arrogance and unwillingness to adapt either funny or moving. It’s aiming to capture the chaos, but instead feels slightly like a student film.

It’s Faustian theme of selling out your principles for glory is just too familiar a story – and the dialogue isn’t funny enough to make the film move with the zingy outrageousness it’s aiming for. It also lacks momentum, the woozy hand-held camerawork actually slowing things down, a very shot lurches into focus. It’s a film crying out for speedy montage and jump-cuts to turn it into a sort of cinematic farce, as the business makes ever more sudden, chancy calls which switch at the mid-point from paying off to unravelling. Instead, it stumbles around like a drunken sailor.

At the centre, Jay Baruchel delivers the most complex work as the awkward and timid Lazaridis who slowly absorbs more and more smart business styling and ruthlessness over the film. But the film fumbles his corruption. His opening mantras – that “good enough is the enemy of humanity”, that Chinese mass production equals low quality because the workers aren’t paid enough to care about the product, that companies should focus on human needs – are all-too obviously dominos set up to get knocked over as Lazaridis gets corrupted and cashes out his principles to turn out exactly the sort of bug-filled mass-produced crap he railed against at the start – but this makes the character himself feel more like a human domino himself rather than living, breathing person.

The other performances all verge on cartoonish. Glenn Howerton channels Gordon Gekko and The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker as abusive, sweary, would-be Master-of-the-Universe, only-interested-in-the-bottom-line Jim Balsille. Balsille will do everything Lazaridis won’t do: he’ll cut corners and browbeat his way into meetings. A smarter film would make clear Balsille is in many ways more effective than Lazaridis – that without him Research in Motion would have gone bust years ago. It could also have looked with more sympathy at a guy who so believed in his one shot at glory he re-mortgaged his house to pay for it. But the film leans into Howerton’s skill at explosive outburst and never really humanises him, constantly shoving him into the role of villain.

The film also fails with its more human element. Director Matt Johnnson plays Doug Fregin, Lazaridis’ best friend and business partner. Fregin is set-up as the angel in Lazaridis shoulder, the decent guy against selling out. But Johnson’s performance lacks charm or likeability. Fregin – like many of the other workers of the company – is a geek-bro, his veins pumping with fratboy passions, who thinks the best way to get people working is to throw a string of parties. He’s, in a way, as wrong as Balsille is on what makes long-term business success. Crucially as well, the friendship between him and Lazaridis never really rings true, not least because Fregin browbeats and bullies the timid Lazaridis as much as Balsille does.

With no-one to really care for, the tragedy of this business never hits home. It does capture the sense of desperation as the once-mighty company collapses in the face of Apple – Lazaridis ramming his head into the sand and refusing to believe anyone would want a phone sans keyboard – but it fails to successfully illustrate why an innovator lost his ‘magic’ touch. The script fails to land much of its humour, and tiptoes around positioning Lazaridis as increasingly corrupted, even as starts hiring brash businessmen (epitomised by Michael Ironside’s sergeant-major fixer) to say the thing to his underlings that he’s too scared to. The financial shenanigans that land Blackberry in trouble with the SEC aren’t properly explained, and the actual reasons the iPhone finally put Blackberry in the dust bin of history are hand-waved away (“minutes… data… look just accept it ok”)

Blackberry would, in the end, have been better as an hour-long documentary, with dramatic reconstructions supported by informative talking heads. The film we have fails to deliver on a concept that bursts with comic and dramatic potential.