The Devil and Donald Trump: Abbasi Reconstructs the Rise of a Crony Capitalist
Among the many wise observations written by nineteenth century Englishman Lord Acton, he noted “Great men are almost always bad men…” But what if they were just plain bad to begin with? And what exactly constitutes greatness? With his fourth film, The Apprentice, filmmaker Ali Abbasi reconstructs the economic rise of Donald Trump through the 1970s and 1980s thanks to his relationship with infamous lawyer Roy Cohn, two men who fall considerably short of anything resembling greatness (at least, if humanity, integrity, and honesty are factors used to determine such a distinction), putting a surprisingly thoughtful spin on both men as logical products of environments and systems which fostered ruthlessness and abject greed.… Read the rest
