Film Critic Harlan Jacobson reviews ‘Horizon: An American Saga’ and ‘The Apprentice’

Listen to the audio version of this review By Harlan Jacobson. 

DD: Our film critic Harlan Jacobson has two films from the recent Cannes film festival, The Apprentice, which everyone wants to see but can’t, and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga, in theatres this weekend, which everyone can see and probably shouldn’t.

HJ: Just when I’d gone 6000 miles across an ocean to tune out the drumbeat of Trumpamania, we got The Apprentice, a film in the competition about the young Donald Trump coming into his own under the tutelage of the notorious Roy Cohn. In the 1980s, when Trump meets Cohn, the latter is still strutting about like a true cock for having put the Rosenbergs in the Chair in the ‘50s.

The Apprentice – Cannes Film Festival

Talk About a Monster’s Ball, director Ali Abassi starts the story from ex-New York Magazine and current Vanity Fair writer Gabe Sherman’s screenplay on Trump, in an understated, even something like sympathetic fashion. As Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong dials up the internal smolder from his Kendall Roy in Succession to Jaws levels of menace so effectively that it’s easy to miss that the harder role to play here is Sebastian Stan’s Trump. Stans, whose ticket to ride has been Bucky Barnes in the Capt. America franchise, here does more than capture the recognizable Trump mannerisms of youth without resorting to James Austin Johnson’s SNL word salad Trump. It’s a portrait that is shaded, part ambitious, part submissive, and finally fully dismissive when Cohn is used up and dying of AIDS.

At the start, you can feel young Trump’s frustration working for Fred Sr., tasked with proceeding down dilapidated Queens hallways of Trump Village, shaking down and out tenants for late rent. Behind each door is a sad story, a plea for more time, a snarl, a pot of boiling water. In trouble for discriminatory rental practices, Trump stumbles into Cohn’s orbit — “Uh, yer Fred Trump’s kid,” Cohn croaks at a table with Carmine Galante and Fat Tony Salerno in some Mafia den — and the revelation of what Cohn has to offer sweeps across Stan’s face like the dark version of Luke Skywalker meeting Yoda: Never admit defeat, never apologize, always attack.  Cohn senses something about the young Trump, and while you have to think that the bug-eyed sybarite in Cohn looked the 6’3” blond Trump up and down as a potential conquest, it was Trump’s submission to his counsel that played into Cohn’s vanity. 

With his last film, Holy Spider, a feminist revenge bloodbath film set in his native Iran that was in Competition in Cannes a couple years back, Abassi is not the first director you’d expect to direct a film about Trump. Gabe Sherman’s script has clearly opened a path for Abassi to organize and pace something of a dark Star is Bornplotline while holding the revulsion in check until Trump becomes recognizable as the guy we know. And then there’s the matter of Ivana (Maria Bakalova) going from Trump’s first bar blonde to bride who out bluffs him on a pre-nup, followed by a rape allegation she later recanted. 

The Apprentice should have gone home happy that it played Cannes and got one of two prizes it needed: respect but no deal. At home, The Washington Post reported that ex-Redskins/Commanders owner and Trump backer Dan Snyder, the investor behind the film’s production company, doesn’t like the film, which puts in doubt a deal to distribute it this fall—you know, when people might want to see it. I’m hopeful Tom Ortenberg, head of Briarcliff Films and a long pedigree of distributing edgy propositions, is able to lock in a theatrical deal to show the film that all my civilian friends say they’re curious about. But it is a risk: the theatrical upside may not be worth the defamation suits to follow for a nervous Trump donor. Hello, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu — line up your lawyers. Everybody will stream it.

Near the end, The Apprentice finally indulges the point of view it has kept semi-sublimated in the narrative, taking us into the operating room to watch what for purposes of plot efficiency looks like a double surgical procedure: Trump fat swirling through liposuction tubes, followed by a bloody scalp recision to take out the growing desert in the orange jungle in which the once and possibly future president’s head is sliced open and viscerally stapled shut, one thick, iron staple at a time going in with a percussive pop, pause, pop, pause, pop—just to rub your nose in what the devil does to get ready for say, a date or a debate.

Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga, shown also at Cannes as a special screening of the first three hour installment in a four feature film series, didn’t occasion much of a rethink about the settling of the West that hasn’t been said before or better (see most recently Taylor Sheridan’s 1886). Costner who wrote and directed the saga also acts at the center of the first wave of Westward migrants, a white guy reeling from a crisis, the Civil War, and stands agape at the great Euro-American immigration lured by huckster hype into the vast unknown, here a made-up town named Horizon that up until the come-on-out flyer was a bend in a scrub brush river the Apache thought was theirs.

A scene from Horizon: An American Saga

After the Bad Kevin of Yellowstone, the mostly good Kevin in Horizon is trying an epic theatrical miniseries with grand ambitions when it opens this weekend. It’s to his credit that it’s 53 minutes before Costner shows up as the strong, silent type, Hayes Ellison on a horse. We get wagon trains, soldiers, varmints, some Gen X Marlboro Men (played by Sam Worthington, Will Patton, Luke Wilson), some hot women and fresh maidens (Sienna Miller, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee), bandits and Brits, Costner’s son, Hayes Costner, as a tender young dude, a few Black and Chinese characters, the minorities now mostly fringe characters slated for expansion in subsequent chapters. If Horizon is Costner’s stab at inclusion, it lacks screen weight now. It also lacks editing and much of a through line beyond whatta country, but the Michael Muro visuals are pretty, if standard, and the John Debney (The Greatest Showman, Jungle Book) score mimics Aaron Copland horns and cowboy violins.

At Cannes, Costner delayed returning to the set to meet with what seemed like the star-struck members of the overseas press, and said he’d painted himself into a terrible corner: he said he used to get paid a little to make films, then he got paid a lot and now he has to pay to make movies. He put his four homes on the line, constituting $38 million of his own money. Not entirely reading the room full of pixel-stained wretches, Costner added that he came to Cannes to shake money from those “rich people on the boats” to complete shooting on segments three and four. I rooted for Costner going into the film, just because he was one of the old guys in Geriatric Cannes this year—Coppola, Schrader, George Miller, David Cronenberg, George Lucas, Meryl Streep, me — taking a big swing. Okay, so he whiffed. I was impressed that the Apache in Horizon were still awake, not just woke, which is more than I can say for myself on either count.

Kevin Costner at Cannes Film Festival

And while it was the local whites who do the scalping in Horizon (it was an ongoing sub theme in Cannes this year, what with Donald Trump paying for one in The Apprentice), Costnern mostly pokes along through vast stretches of hokum.