This biopic had Trump ‘purple with rage’ — could it help him?
Donald Trump hates the new movie about him, but the ‘bottom line’ is it might even help his chances.
It would have been enough to make Salieri choke on his strudel. For more than 150 years, Antonio Salieri, if he was remembered at all, was known as a minor Italian composer. But as a result of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, and Milos Forman’s Oscar-winning film of the play, Salieri morphed into an envious, talentless drudge who drove the genius Mozart to his death.
Historians have dutifully pointed out that Salieri composed a few good tunes himself, and that the pair got along well enough in Vienna for Salieri to conduct his rival’s music both before and after Mozart died. But the movie mud stuck, with even the renowned Mozart scholar H. C. Robbins Landon conceding that thanks to Peter Shaffer and Hollywood it might prove “difficult” to dissuade the public from thinking of Mozart as a “divinely gifted drunken lout, pursued by a vengeful Salieri”.
I thought of this as I watched Donald Trump undergoing liposuction in The Apprentice. Another scene shows Trump having “scalp reduction” treatment to cover up his bald spot. (It’s a surgical carpet repair that involves tugging skin from a part of the scalp with hair and using it to cover bald areas.)
Directed by Ali Abassi and starring Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as New York lawyer Roy Cohn, The Apprentice claims to have been “inspired” by real events but has been dismissed by Trump’s campaign team as “pure fiction”.
Trump himself wasted no time denouncing the film, describing it as a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job”.
Defamatory and politically disgusting, maybe, but with a cast led by Stan and Strong, stars respectively of the Marvel cinematic universe and Emmy award-winning drama Succession, perhaps not so cheap.
The Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, chimed in, decrying The Apprentice as “malicious defamation” that belongs in a “dumpster fire” and “should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store”.
The film’s most controversial scene shows Trump sexually assaulting his first wife, Ivana – an allegation that Ivana made in her 1989 divorce deposition. But when the allegation was published four years later in a book called The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, Ivana retracted it, saying that while she had referred to the incident as a “rape”, she did not want her words to be interpreted in “a literal or criminal sense”.
It has been suggested, though, that the one part of the movie that will have made the Orange Jesus turn purple with rage is the sequence showing him under the scalpel for scalp reduction and liposuction. Slate called it the film’s “most devastating sequence”. So the alleged rape and the bankruptcies and the amphetamine pills were things Trump could ride out, but there was no coming back from Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn telling him, “You have a big ass. You gotta work on that.”
The film’s writer, Gabriel Sherman, admitted as much when he told Vanity Fair magazine that the sequence was “the final stage of making the monster that Roy Cohn created”.
But The Apprentice is not the first Trump picture to coincide with a presidential race. In 2016, a near-unrecognisable Johnny Depp played Trump in Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie, described as a “satirical rendition” of Trump’s 1987 best-selling business book.
Shot in secret and rush-released to coincide with Trump’s victory in the 2016 New Hampshire primaries, it received mixed reviews, although Entertainment Weekly liked it, calling the movie “utterly demented, slightly terrifying, and most of all hilarious”.
In a witty post-credits sequence Ron Howard, playing himself, describes the movie as “awful … hauntingly bad. It kinda makes me want to rethink my passion for filmmaking”. But it did Trump no harm, and – who knows? – might even have helped propel him past Hillary Clinton and into the White House.
Could The Apprentice have the same effect? It might depend on how many people watch it.
The movie struggled to find a US distributor, and by the middle of this week had made less than $US4.5m ($6.7m) worldwide.
According to IMDb, it opened on 1740 American screens but has shed several hundred screens since then, while its average daily taking has slumped from $US339 per screen to just $US70.
Overseas, the film has performed better. It’s going gangbusters in France, earning $2920 per screen on its opening weekend, and took an average of $1600 per screen on its first weekend in Australia.
Abassi and his cast have hit the talk show and film festival circuit to sell The Apprentice, with the director assuring one interviewer that his film is “fact-based and fact-checked” and involved “rigorous journalistic work”, while wondering aloud “what is controversial about it?”.
Jeremy Strong told the BBC: “We’re not setting out to idealise or monster-fy these people. We’re setting out to hold the mirror up to nature.”
His co-star Sebastian Stan felt that Trump ought to be grateful: “We’ve pretty much handed him a very complex, three-dimensional take on his life, and I can’t recall anyone else doing that.”
But can Trump survive his depiction as the guy with the “big ass” who went under the knife to have his rug tightened? While he was president, Trump hit back at critics by accusing them of having plastic surgery, despite the fact that – as Vanity Fair commented – “plastic surgery is a fairly normalised practice, especially in Los Angeles and New York”.
Mocking the fake Time magazine covers of himself that hung in several of Trump’s golf clubs, news anchor Mika Brzezinski quipped that “nothing makes a man feel better than making a fake cover of a mag about himself, lying every day and destroying the country”.
Trump fired back on X (formerly Twitter) that “Crazy Mika” had come to Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row around New Year’s Eve and “insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a facelift. I said no!” Even his supporters objected to that.
King Richard III was reviled for more than four centuries after Shakespeare wrote his biopic. Characterised on stage as a “lump of foul deformity” and a “poisonous bunchback’d toad”, Richard was only rehabilitated in the public mind after his bones were found under a car park in Leicester.
Donald Trump, whose fondness for gold and palatial homes suggests royal (not to say imperial) pretensions of his own, may live to regret the job Hollywood has done on him.
It certainly didn’t work out well for Salieri.
