Producers: Dave Caplan, Kevin Mann and Daniela Taplin Lundberg   Director: Hallie Meyers-Shyer   Screenplay: Hallie Meyers-Shyer   Cast: Michael Keaton, Mila Kunis, Carmen Ejogo, Michael Urie, Kevin Pollak, Vivien Lyra Blair, Jacob Kopera, Nico Hiraga, Carlos Solórzano, Danny Deferrari, Laura Benanti, Carlos Ragas, Poorna Jagannathan and Andie MacDowell   Distributor: Ketchup Entertainment

Grade: B-

If you feel a sense of déjà vu watching “Goodrich,” it might be that you remember seeing Michael Keaton in “Mr. Mom,” the 1983 comedy written by John Hughes, which was based on a similar premise—the character played by Keaton has to assume primary responsibility for the care of his children while his wife is away. 

Of course, there are significant differences in the script by Hallie Meyers-Shyer.  Andy Goodrich (Keaton) isn’t a fired autoworker, like Jack Butler was in the earlier film.  He’s the owner of a boutique Los Angeles art gallery that he’s lavished so much time and attention on that he’s long neglected his family.  Grace (Mila Kunis), his daughter from his first marriage to art dealer Ann (Andie MacDowell), is estranged from him, and he’s oblivious to the fact that that his current wife Naomi (Laura Benanti), the mother of nine-year old twins Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Mose (Jacob Kopera), has a drug problem. 

In fact, he’s dumbfounded when, alone in bed, he gets an early-morning phone call from Naomi telling him that she’s checked herself into a ninety-day program at a rehab center and may be leaving him as well.  He’s thrust into the job of taking care of the children, and turns to Grace, who’s expecting her first child, for emergency help, despite that fact that she’s irritated not only by his long-term neglect but his dismissive attitude toward her amiable husband Pete (Danny Deferrari).

All this is happening while his gallery is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, a fact that his long-time partner Sy (Kevin Pollak) and loyal young assistant Jonny (Nico Hiraga) keep reminding him of.  His only hope is to convince Lola Thompson (Carmen Ejogo), who’s just inherited her mother’s highly regarded paintings, to sign with him rather than a larger gallery.

Meanwhile Andy becomes friends with Terry (Michael Urie), the father of Alexander (Carlos Solórzano), an autistic classmate of his son and daughter—a gay man with financial and emotional problems of his own.

All of this makes for a busy scenario blending comedy with drama, and Keaton shows that he’s lost none of his skill in handling both.  His performance is, in its way, as energetic as his Beetlejuice, but filled with a charm that morphs from initial desperation to ultimate acceptance of his failings.  It’s not that it isn’t obvious where Andy’s story is headed; the arc of “Goodrich” is, despite a few swerves along the way, predictable, with a final sequence at a hospital pretty much predetermined as soon as Grace’s pregnancy is disclosed.  But Keaton pulls off the character’s transformation with the panache of the old pro he is.

Among those in support Kunis is clearly the most important.  Grace experiences a transformation no less intense than Andy’s, and the actress captures her transition from anger over seeing her father develop a paternal attitude toward the children of his second marriage that he never managed toward her to an appreciation of his efforts effectively.

The rest of the cast is all fine.  Though youngsters Blair and Kopera don’t entirely avoid the inclination to act precociously mature, Hiraga, Deferrari and Urie exude likability even if they all seem entirely squeaky clean.  Ejogo, meanwhile, is credibly pragmatic, though Lola’s introduction of Goodrich to the bohemian world she inhabits comes across as a mite sitcomish.

Technical credits are engagingly low-key.  Richard Bloom’s production design is suitably upscale, with Andy’s gallery especially well appointed, and Jamie Ramsay’s cinematography is pleasantly unfussy; Lisa Zeno Churgin’s editing is a mite too easygoing and Christopher Willis’ score can oversell the whimsy. 

But they all contribute to a movie about learning to value family over work that’s heavy on niceness and sidesteps weightier concerns—how will Andy make it financially now that his business is kaput?  Is a child custody battle in the wings between him and Naomi?—in its determination to end happily.  It’s a pretty ramshackle, old-fashioned contraption Meyers-Shyer has fashioned, but Keaton and his cohorts make it a mostly engaging, if formulaic, crowd-pleaser.

Producers: Daniel Bekerman, Jacob Jarek, Ruth Treacy, Julianne Forde, Louis Tisné and Ali Abbasi   Director: Ali Abbasi   Screenplay: Gabriel Sherman   Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall, Joe Pingue, Ron Lea, Edie Inksetter, Matt Baram, Moni Ogunsuyi, Brad Austin, Stuart Hughes, Jim Monaco, Bruce Beaton, Ian D. Clark, Eoin Duffy and Valerie O’Connor   Distributor: Briarcliff Entertainment

Grade: B-

You might think that Donald Trump and William Shakespeare are, to quote one of them, strange bedfellows, but writer Gabriel Sherman and director Ali Abbasi have modeled their movie about the former’s rise after the latter’s “Henry IV” duology, though the title obviously tips its hat to the once and perhaps future president’s (shudder!) TV show.  The difference is that here Trump is the apprentice who learns from Roy Cohn, the unscrupulous lawyer who’d been a major force behind the brief but horrendous Red-baiting career of Senator Joe McCarthy.  Though Trump is hardly Prince Hal (compare his rants to the “Agincourt” speech), he does discard Cohn (though a hedonist, not the jovial fat man), as Henry did his bosom buddy Falstaff after his accession, when their friendship became inconvenient.  And England in the early fifteenth century was certainly no less squalid politically than New York City in the seventies and eighties.  

As “The Apprentice” opens in 1974 against the backdrop of Richard Nixon’s resignation, Donald (Sebastian Stan, nicely mimicking Trump’s vocal mannerisms in their early stages) is a nervous hustler trying to break into the upper echelons of New York City’s real estate moguldom.  He has big dreams, but at the moment is trying to extricate his daddy Fred’s (Martin Donovan) company from a DOJ probe into discriminatory renting practices.  (He’s also humiliated trying to collect rents personally from unruly tenants.)  During a night on the town he ingratiates himself with Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who’s sharing a table at an expensive club with some mob cronies.

Trump pleads with Cohn to take on his case, and Cohn does, bringing his brutally take-no-prisoners style to bear.  He becomes not just Trump’s lawyer, but his mentor, instructing him in his three rules—always attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and always declare victory whatever the outcome—that become cornerstones of Trump’s own conduct.  Indeed, the student, already primed by his hard-driving father to go for the jugular, surpasses the teacher in following them, so that in the end even Cohn feels he’s overdoing it in contentious meetings with political figures like Mayor Ed Koch (Ian D. Clark, rather too short for the part), whom he tries to bully into agreeing to tax breaks on a construction project as Cohn looks on embarrassed.

Meanwhile Trump uses his connection with Cohn to romance, and wed, Czech beauty Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova), though she’s put off by the pre-nup Cohn insists on her signing.  The movie intermittently follows the disintegration of the marriage, which ends, in this telling, with Trump forcing himself on Ivana in what amounts to rape.  Other family matters are also briefly touched on: the sad life of Donald’s older brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick), an alcoholic his father dismisses as soft though his mother Mary Anne (Catherine McNally) protects him, and Donald’s effort, when his father has become barely competent, to take over control of the family trust, something Mary Anne strenuously resists.

That episode reflects the hardening of Trump’s initially desperate and malleable personality under Cohn’s malign influence so that by the close of the movie in 1987, when Trump is discussing “The Art of the Deal” with his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz (Eoin Duffy), he’s replaced the distinction between “winners and losers” in Cohn’s third rule with “killers and losers.”  Along the way he’s shown hobnobbing with the likes of Roger Stone (Mark Rendall), Rupert Murdoch (Tom Barnett) and Andy Warhol (Bruce Beaton) and being interviewed by Rona Barrett (Valerie O’Connor, convincing) and Mike Wallace (Stuart Hughes, not so much).  He’s also given way to his immense vanity, conferring with a doctor (Matt Baram) about liposuction and surgery to cover his bald spot—procedures he’s shown undergoing in grisly detail.

But by this time Cohn learns just how much a clone of himself he’s helped create.  His long-time lover Russell Eldridge (Ben Sullivan) has fallen ill with AIDS, and when Trump reneges on a promise to give him a place to live, Cohn, ill himself (but always insisting it’s not AIDS, but pneumonia or liver disease), accuses him of a lack of decency—ironic, considering the source.  Even after the two reconcile and Trump throws the wheelchair- bound Cohn a birthday bash, his gift turns out not the advertised diamond cufflinks but costume jewelry.  (Her husband, Ivana whispers, has no shame about lying—or anything else.)

Obviously this is hardly a flattering portrait of the young grafter on the make, but it is a fascinating one of a man who outdoes his mentor in meanness, in both meanings of the word.  And the two leads play off one another expertly.  Stan is able to depict the trajectory of Trump’s transformation with greater sensitivity than one might imagine; the performance is much more than a one-note impression.  Strong is positively ferocious throughout most of the film, embodying to the full Cohn’s venomous, self-deluding sense of grandeur, but in the final reels he becomes a shrunken, pathetic figure for whom one feels a bit of sympathy even knowing the miseries he’d inflicted on others.  It’s mostly a two-man show; Donovan and Bakalova each get a few moments to shine, but the operative word is “few.”

More notable is the deliberately seedy look of the film.  In the early going production designer Aleks Marinkovich and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen capture the sheer grunginess of mid-1970s NYC—the gritty footage actually suggests a picture shot then (an effect the choppy editing by Olivia Neergaard-Holm and Olivier Bugge Coutté reinforces), and even when Trump’s world turns richer, they and costumer Laura Montgomery manage to convey how its gaudiness is ostentatiously tacky rather than stylish.  Martin Dirkov’s score adds to the rather sleazy atmosphere of it all.

Trump partisans are denouncing Abbasi’s movie as a hit-job, and they’re right; but it’s a pretty effective one.  It was surely a mistake, however, for them to have excoriated it so vociferously and threatened lawsuits to keep it from being distributed.  That merely gave a publicity shot in the arm to a movie that might otherwise have passed virtually unnoticed.  Now it’s become a cause célèbre, and partisans on the other side will probably seek it out. It won’t change any minds, but it’s likely to fatten some wallets a bit.