Do you know what Ed Gein used to say about movies? | The Apprentice (2024) Movie Review | #OscarsHomework
This Trump-smearing movie is the most Trump-like film I’ve ever seen 🪞
The Apprentice is in poorer taste than any film I’ve attempted to watch in recent memory. Full disclosure: I gave up at the rape scene. So this will be different from literally every other movie review I’ve ever written in that I did not bother to finish this unpleasant, poorly-calibrated mess. I still think I can speak definitively on the elements I’ll cover, though, which are my low opinion of the film generally, and whether Jeremy Strong or Sebastian Stan deserve to win or will win Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor at the Oscars. What an upsetting piece of #OscarsHomework. Miss this one, we say.
— Kay and the cats
I LiveSky film reviews over on BlueSky, and then piece them together with commentary to make my full reviews here on Medium before they go to Letterbox’d. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of my shenanigans…
Well, I gave up on this one.
Although, to be fair, I was giving up on this movie from before its opening credits.
But I was not prejudiced against this movie.
In fact, coming on the heels of A Different Man, Sebastian Stan had a lot of goodwill from me in the bank, and I submit this bleet as evidence I went into this thing with an open heart and only the best of intentions:
Not even snarky references to the discourse or context, because (surprise!) I wasn’t aware of any. I vaguely knew that there was some biopic of Trump that was not pro-Trump, and that Stan and Jeremy Strong were in it.
That was it. It was #OscarsHomework.
Jeremy Strong also had nothing but goodwill and benefits of doubt from me, headed into The Apprentice.
I would argue that here, at this point, and even after the next bleet, I still haven’t yet turned on the movie.
I’m always trying to make jokes, and that’s a pretty good-natured, whatever tease. And I was flagging my weird experience (which is all I’m ever doing re: film or anything) watching so many production logos flit across the screen. It was similar to watching an Adult Swim joint, where it’s funny at first, then it’s actually boring and terrible, and then you spend so long there that when it persists even further, it’s kind of hilarious.
But whatever! As a BlueSky reply pointed out: it takes a lot of organization and cooperation to get European movies off the ground.
Okay, whatever. Let the record reflect that I still haven’t turned.
I think you can detect it here, if you’re reading closely. That ellipsis says a lot. Translation: ‘I don’t know quite what to think of this, but I certainly don’t have enough information to hate this, yet.’
My unremitting contempt and categorical disdain for this movie were not premeditated.
The only axe I have to grind here is the same one I’m always grinding: I prize substantive, worthwhile storytelling and, like, the transformative magic of cinema. And I value a dollar, so since we’re all engaged in the commerce of art, it matters what’s good and what isn’t. People’s dollars (and, I’d argue, souls) are at stake (if they had any, obviously).
So, as a corollary: I also condemn bad storytelling. It’s a waste of our time and money, and frankly, the financing party’s (usually a studio, though in this case, not), as well.
For a bit of context, read my review of alleged-film Homestead.
Bad politics don’t offend me. They can’t! There’s way too much of that going around, and I can’t take all of that personally. Who has the time or emotional bandwidth?
What offended me in Homestead was cheap, cynical, bad-faith storytelling, and not for nothing — in my mind and heart — Homestead and The Apprentice are very, very similar films.
Similar in terms of quality (poor), but also, like, spiritually. I think they’re both spiritually-bankrupt movies, so flawed in premise that no quality of execution could have saved them, not that either had any.
An Indecent Promposal
I’ll address what I intuited would be the likely defense or rebuttal to any of my criticisms of the film, such as: it’s tasteless; it’s trashy; it’s lowbrow; it’s mean-spirited; it lacks any substance or artistic merit whatsoever (which doesn’t mean it isn’t compelling ever — at times, it is):
That’s the point, idiot.
Respectfully, I don’t think I’m the idiot.
For a movie that is so gleefully, unrestrainedly anti-Trump, this movie — the film, itself, comprising all its sensibilities and choices — is a lot like Trump.
The Apprentice is boorish and blunt. The script is dumb, but thinks it’s smart. Every character onscreen is either a bully or being bullied, which is such a Trumpian lens through which to view the world (dog-eat-dog? is that plus dementia how you get ‘they’re eating the dogs?’).
In its posturing and flourishes, it’s clear this movie (by which I mean, whomever is responsible for it) has too high an opinion of what it’s accomplishing at any given moment, is always, always loud and obnoxious and somehow manages to mishandle everything it touches.
So, like, yeah, I guess art imitates life, sometimes.
But I don’t know that making a movie taking down Trump in the spirit of Trump was a sound premise, though, or could have succeeded at all.
Best (Acting) Boys
Let me absolve Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong entirely, both from any responsibility for this film’s storytelling, and for any chance at an acting Oscar this year.
Neither Homestead nor The Apprentice felt like real movies, and for a lot of the same reasons.
There are differences, too. I did finish Homestead, but Homestead also had the grace not to depict one of its characters raping another onscreen. Swings and roundabouts.
They’re both just not very good, though.
Stan and Strong are two compelling, interesting, dynamic performers, but no amount or quality of acting could have saved this thing.
…it’s fair to say I’ve turned on the movie at this point.
As well I should.
By eight minutes into the runtime of A Real Pain, I had put BlueSky away and hunted down and downloaded the screenplay, because it was obvious the movie was so good that it would reward closer viewing. Locking in would pay off.
The Apprentice is the opposite, just like Homestead is the opposite: the more of yourself you pour into them, it’s just the more of you pouring of your vitality and joy into a tar pit that could and would never give any of those back to you again, in any amount.
Movies are always telling on themselves. This one was patently, obviously what it was as soon as it started being a movie.
And there we are, back to the rub.
I would imagine — and I haven’t done a ton of research — that the defense against my primary complaint (this film is tawdry and tacky and trashy, which informs everything it does) is: yeah, so is Trump!
True. Kind of irrelevant, though.
Work Less Self-Destructively, Not Harder
Whew. It was a lot to take in.
How far did I make it before I took my first of several hours-long breaks over several days?
Not quite ten minutes of runtime.
As an aside, I’m very into self-care lately. I think it pays dividends, and isn’t selfish or self-centered. It’s smart!
So when I feel like I need a break from this self-imposed not-job, I take a break.
If it needs to be a while, it’s a while.
In this case, it was a little less than an hour, because it was 4:10p when I got back to ‘work.’
A Microcosm of Things To Come
You could argue the two leads are giving good performances. They’re both nominated as the best of their gender to do it this year, so it’s a fair question to ask: were they any good?
Well, a lot goes into an acting performance, and I think that the performances were uniformly not working for me across the board speaks to the philosophy and vision of the filmmaker. I guess I’ll have to name him, since I keep saying heinous shit about what must have been going on in his head and heart: [I look him up and realize who he is] Ali Abbasi. Oh wow, shit, I literally only just looked it up, and that guy directed several episodes of The Last of Us that were incredible.
… with someone else’s script and sensibility and IP. Hmmm…
I emphatically do not know the guy. I don’t even really know his work, or, well, I do now, I guess. I don’t care for it.
If the direction (or vision) is bad, an actor doesn’t have the narrative pull to save it, no actor does. It’s like gravity, wherein a star and a planet both pull, but one has a much, much bigger impact and the other arguably has impact only in the aggregate.
Is the direction bad?
Well, that’s a tough question that probably only the actors could honestly answer, and I doubt we’ll hear it from the horses’ mouths. But we can always parse the work, the finished product.
First, let’s look at what the extras and some of the ancillary characters were up to when the cameras were pointed at them.
A quick note about how I refer to the character: I think I managed to exclusively refer to the character in my bleets as Stan’s Trump, as distinct from Trump who really exists, and even as distinct from Don Trump, the character on the page before Stan got to him.
That’s sort of how I absolve him of any wrongdoing for this artistic crime. Actors have a job to do, and he did what he was asked to do, and made some interesting choices (though, again, it doesn’t feel like anyone said no to any choices).
It’s the director’s job to see some of this shit, and say, “Wow! Really strong stuff! I love it? That wasn’t it, though. Let’s make this adjustment,” and, you know, eventually get to something worthwhile.
I also think if you wanted to give Stan an award for this performance, I’d argue you’d first have to give awards to Alec Baldwin and James Austin Johnson. If we’re awarding impressions, they’re way better. If what we’re rewarding excludes impressions, then why is this performance even under consideration?
Break two. I was really trying to give this thing a chance.
Speaking ‘F*g’ to Power
I didn’t miss my guess.
The movie uses the word faggot at least twice.
It all sort of washed over me at a certain point, but yeah, in retrospect, it was pretty naive of me to think that it would remain subtextual, as though this film were capable of doing anything subtly.
Here’s what’s at the heart of this thing for me, at least vis-à-vis the Best Actor nomination for Sebastian Stan and the Best Supporting Actor nomination for Jeremy Strong:
There are more than just superficial parallels to A Complete Unknown, by the by.
The refrain of that review was, ‘why do we keep lionizing this guy?’ but that wouldn’t be a fair criticism of this film. This film doesn’t lionize Trump, though in trolling and smearing him, it does (unintentionally? probably?) absolve him, in the sense that Stan imbues him with some sympathetic humanity of some kind, such as to my knowledge, Donald Trump, the man, has never displayed any hint of possessing.
If you read my A Complete Unknown review, or even my The Fire Inside review, you know I think biopics are — to my taste — an inherently-flawed or cursed artistic endeavor or enterprise.
You’re asking an actor or actors to do something radically different, I feel, than Acting — to mimic a living person, i.e. to do an impression, versus ‘creating a character.’ But whether it’s Timothée Jason Chalamraz doing a really-compelling, spot-on Bob Dylan or Sebastian Stan doing an objectively-mediocre, mostly-lips-and-jaw Donald Trump impression, what they’re doing isn’t the normal job of acting.
Call me a purist (seriously, do it — it’s my kink), but I think that the job of the actor is to collaborate with the director to create and bring to life a character, using the script as their medium.
There’s an enormous, enormous difference between what appears on the page — however good or bad — and what appears onscreen, and that delta is Acting.
So it matters, I think. And I think it’s hard to do, too.
Granted, my acting experience is limited to one, single, nearly-award-winning (I forfeited the grand prize in a fit of artistic pique over swearing/profanity in the project; don’t ask me what word I fought for, it’s one of the worst ones) performance starring in a short film I wrote, directed and helped shoot in high school, and a handful of acting credits in Club Theatre at the Honors College at the University of Houston (Go Coogs!).
Suffice it to say: I’m not an expert.
But it seems to me — just a simple, ginger, suburbs-mouse, mind you — that if you ask any actor, even Daniel Day-Goddamn-Lewis, to take on the role of a living, breathing human being that they have to shadow and copy, or watch tapes of and copy, or if any part of their creative process involves ‘copying,’ then I think you’re going to run into problems that, for this reviewer, don’t have solutions.
So, do Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan deserve Oscars for their performances?
Well, again, it’s not their fault(s), but, for my money, they gave bad performances.
Are we giving awards for that?
So, like, what’s UP with this movie?
I thought, over and over again, how to sum up the experience I was having, because I think this movie gets itself filthy enough in the mud that it’s slinging that one could argue forever, in bad-faith and in circles, about what it meant to do, or why.
In reviewing these, it’s kind of amusing that at 9:08 I said “I’m going to slog through this thing,” and then at 9:18 said, “I don’t know if I’m gonna make it.”
I return to my main point: this movie is flawed in its inception, at the molecular, premise level. When these characters — whom the film clearly also thinks are bad people and not worth rooting for — want different things and are in conflict with each other, there’s a natural human tendency to take sides, so the experience I had was of picking the lesser of two evils in any situation where there was actual conflict and drama.
Fortunately (?), those were few and far between.
Not ALL Bad
So to bolster my thesis that Stan and Strong are blameless in this thing: Actors are tools, weapons of a director. I mean, first and foremost, they’re human beings and people, but within the context of what their job is, if you take a terrific actor and aim him in a bad direction, it’s arguably worse than if you take a bad actor and aim him in that same direction.
Either way, it’s not the weapon’s fault where it’s pointed.
So, there are good things in this film. In moments, the few that are calibrated or aimed properly from a top-down perspective, Stan and Strong can both be great, and are.
But…
In service of what?
Not for nothing, the funeral scene had no dialogue, so there was, therefore, relatively little opportunity for a bad and ill-intentioned script to interject itself and ruin the moment.
Now, I turn on MY heroes, just like Stan’s Trump did to Strong’s Cohn
For some context, I think Inglorious Basterds’ opening scene (the full thing, from title card to “Shoshanna!” and the field after) is next-level. It’s so finely-crafted, yet feels so exhilarating, effortless, energetic and possessed of narrative and visual momentum. My Gos*, I get excited just thinking and writing about it.
*Ryan Gosling. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in Ryan Gosling.
However, even that film that I revere, from a guy I revere, kind of loses me when it actually kills Hitler, signifying that it's alternate-history or a multiverse proposition or… something.
Unlike Inglorious Basterds, I knew going into the theatre to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that it played fast and loose with facts and history, and it was even more interesting to me because these events were closer to the current era than World War II; in fact, numerous subjects depicted in the film were still alive.
And by ‘interesting,’ I mean as in, ‘How interesting. Perhaps the greatest living filmmaker (don’t tell him I said so; he already thinks that, and doesn’t need to hear it any more) is tackling this seemingly-insoluble problem again, and it nearly worked for me in Inglorious Basterds, so let’s see.’
Nah. Once Upon works way less for me than Inglorious, despite both being some of the best, like, work (on paper) done by a filmmaker in recent memory. A guy at the absolute top of his craft who, in my opinion, whiffed (a bit and then badly) on story selection.
Every time Tarantino talks about the stress and burden of preserving his ‘perfect legacy,’ I want to give him a hug, and tell him, ‘definitely don’t worry about that, buddy.’
“So bad it’s hilarious, but def not so bad it’s good.”
I want to underscore that we’re moving roughly chronologically through my attempted watch of The Apprentice, and we’re not yet at the 80-minute mark.
Good googly-moogly.
Why do you think he removes their skins, Agent Starling?
I alluded earlier to more-than-just-superficial shared-DNA between A Complete Unknown and The Apprentice.
It shares more-than-superficial similarities with a lot of things, because I don’t think there's an original or worthwhile thought anywhere in the script of this film, so it at times acts as a kind of winking pastiche (playing the hits it didn’t write) and, more often, like some kind of demented forum-shitpost, full of injokes and references, come to stumbling, shambling life. It’s as over-acted as it is under-written or badly-written, because a lot of good and decent performers were conned into giving this their all. Shame on whomever conned them.
Honestly? I’m not even sure it’s Abbasi that did. He reportedly joined the project late, way into the back half of a hellish production that seems to this reviewer’s eyes to be born purely of spite, malice and ill-will.
Why else depict the rape? (Whether or not it occurred in reality is besides the point, truly)
And now we’ve arrived.
Irredeemable
Woof. The Apprentice was bad, and it should feel bad.
#OscarsHomework
My #OscarsHomework watch progress!
Best Pic 🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛🟩
Best Actress ⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩
Best Actor 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
Sup. Actress 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
Sup. Actor 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
Best Animated ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
Best Int’l ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
Directing 🟩⬛⬛🟩⬛
#oscaround
The Substance (2024) is up next. Follow me on BlueSky for the live bleet movie review.
Best Actor
Granted, I have yet to see Sing Sing, but even so, I think I can confidently say that what Adrien Brody did in The Brutalist is peerless and if I were picking this thing, I’d feel comfortable putting it in his hands right now.
As we now know, Stan (who, btw, could have been here for realsies on the merit of his leading performance in A Different Man) can be eliminated. Conclave is fine, and good work from Ralph Fiennes (neither name said the way you think), but it would be a cinema sin to snub A++ Brody for B+ Fiennes. Fiennes is better in other things, and I don’t know that you can say that about Adrien Brody.
A Complete Unknown’s Timofey Mozgov is the dark horse here, though I would disqualify him for the biopic reasons we previously discussed. But smug-prick Bob Dylan played by method-y hyper-handsome young sex symbol is the kind of thing AMPAS loves to be seen to celebrate.
Who deserves it?
Whew, that’s a loaded question, but since you’re asking: Adrien Brody for László Tóth (The Brutalist).
Best Supporting Actor
I have a similar gap in my knowledge base here, too. But I also think it’s similarly indisputable and heads-and-shoulders one guy: Kieran Culkin.
He blew the fucking doors off A Real Pain, and was the best part of a movie that was nothing but best-parts.
Similar to Brody and Sing Sing’s Domingo, I almost don’t need to see what Yuriy Borisov (no offense, and congratulations on the nomination) did in Anora to know that Kieran Culkin should win this thing, and I also think he will.
Guy Pearce is your dark horse here, and I think it’s unfortunate that he’s going to drown in an embarrassment of riches this year, but — for me — it has to be Culkin.
PSA: You never, ever have to finish a movie. It’s lucky you’re there, watching, and if it forfeits that privilege, you don’t owe it a goddamn thing.
