Melania Review: Trump Doc Fails to Be Best

Melania
(USA, 90 min.)
Dir. Brett Ratner
Prod. Brett Ratner, Fernando Sulichin, Marc Beckman, Melania Trump

 

Someone in the music department has a wicked sense of humour. Melania begins with one of the absurdly expensive, and totally random, needle drops that arise through this portrait of Melania Trump. As America’s Worst Lady exits Mar-a-Lago, the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” appears on the soundtrack. It aims to be a slick moment as Mrs. Trump struts through her opulent Florida mansion and its gaudy grounds. In voiceover, Melania invites audiences along for the ride leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration of her husband. Her spiel ends and a black SUV whisks her away. As Melania sets the stage for her self-produced vanity project, “Gimme Shelter” crescendos.  and Merry Clayton’s iconic vocals cry “Rape! Murder!” on the soundtrack. For a brief moment, Melania has the seeds for camp political theatre.

However, this feature-length vanity project doesn’t little interest in politics aside from some self-serving oopsies. Directed by Brett Ratner, best known for the allegations of sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct against him, the star-studded Razzie winner Movie 43 and the equally star-studded The Epstein Files, returns from the ashes as a shlockmeister of documentary. There’s no mistaking it: Melania is reputation-saving hokum. But it’s mostly just pathetic.

Melania follows Mrs. Trump over the first twenty days of January 2025 as she readies for the inauguration. Her duties include preparing the Whitehouse for the family changeover, perfecting her wardrobe, and throwing a candlelight dinner for VIPs. In voiceover, Melania explains how being the First Lady involves huge responsibilities and big decisions. Cue an extended scene of Melania trying on her inauguration day suit. She provides some feedback about the fit of the waist and the width of the collar. Such is the weight of being the First Lady.

Her designer and his assistants fawn over her, too. They love having a First Lady who used to be a model. Mrs. Trump gives precise and clear feedback. Things get really serious when she gives tailoring instructions for sharper top for her hat. World peace is small potatoes where Melania operates.

This gnat-on-the-wall portrait of trivial frivolity says so much about the sphere of entitlement that characterizes the Trump dynasty. Their reality concerns itself with providing caviar-filled golden eggs to the wealthiest elites—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos—in the name of making America great again. Melania plays musical chairs with White House furniture, choosing new Slovenian glassware to represent her country (fair enough) and ridding the home of Democrat dressings. The overlay of empty rhetoric about uplifting Americans paired with scenes of styling her personal tastes at taxpayers’ expense proves informative. However, it’s nothing that we don’t already know.

To Mrs. Trump’s credit, she displays a good eye for style and often comes across as polite and kind, if insincerely so. It’s all for show. The documentary observes her comfort with fashion and design. But there’s more to politics than differentiating between blue and cerulean.

Even when Melania captures the First Lady in action discussing her initiatives, like the “Be Best” campaign to protect children’s mental health, everything about the staging comes across as inauthentic. There’s no acknowledgement that she aims to protect kids from cyberbullying (a worthy cause) while her husband enjoys infamy as one of the pettiest and most prolifically vitriolic social media users who spews poisonous misogyny and users his platform to throw global politics into chaos while weaponizing his followers. Her meetings with French First Lady Brigitte Macron and Jordan’s Princess Rania merely offer photo-op platitudes.

Moreover, as the trio of cinematographers, including Barry Peterson (Tower Heist) and Oscar nominees Jeff Cronenweth (The Social Network), and Dante Spinotti (The Insider)—none of whom has much experience in documentary—capture Mrs. Trump in the corridors of power, the design of the film itself feels equally forced. Every scene plays like a set-up as the film with carefully (ish) staged shot/reverse shot sequences that fall back on dramatic practices instead of trusting vérité to capture the mundane fashion fittings. The doc doesn’t do Melania any favours, either, with its misogynistic eye for the First Lady’s responsibilities. As narration shares Melania’s thoughts about elevating the position of First Lady, the action to match it makes her seem delusional as she concerns herself with looking good and playing house.

Even glimpses at her family life ring hollow. In one scene, Melania sits with her father and he talks about the family and her late mom. The film quickly fades out her father’s voice and replaces it with Melania’s phony narration. Nobody gets to talk about Melania but Melania. That scene, naturally, precedes some voiceover about the importance of family.

At one point, Melania’s true self cracks through the narration when she talks about all the horror her husband’s endured, like slander and surviving an attempted murder. Her anger icily penetrates the film as she guards herself against a rant about liberals. But the closest that Ratner seems interested in penetrating global politics comes when he observes Melania’s feedback on Trump’s inauguration speech. She adds “and unifier” to his pipe-dream of being the world’s “peacemaker.”

More revealing is an awkward exchange with a White House employee to discuss the transition of First Families. She explains how moving the Bidens out and the Trumps in, all within five-hours, summons the “Olympics of interior decorating.” It turns out that nothing can go in or out until the changeover becomes official. That great nugget invites an even better one.

The woman proudly tells Mrs. Trump how much it means to her and her Laotian parents to live the American dream. As she extols the wonders of a country that allows anyone to make a life for herself, Melania appears visibly uncomfortable. Her eyes dart to the camera as if signalling Ratner to give the lady the hook and bail her out. The contrast between the sentiment in the room and the havoc wrought upon new Americans throughout the Trump administrations is jarring. Ratner lets the camera roll as Melania squirms, caught between the positions of being an immigrant and someone who enjoys great power in America by disenfranchising others who, like her, came there in search of a better life.

Melania might actually be documentary gold in the hands of a talented filmmaker with something to say, albeit a left-leaning one. One could easily recut this material to critique the emptiness of the Trump clan and the dangers of being completely uninterested in politics in one of the most powerful positions in the world. However, Ratner insulates Melania to normalize what she represents. The most insightful question Ratner throws at Melania is a query about her favourite song. She says it’s Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and they do some Carpool Karaoke. At the end of the film, title cards extol the milestones that Mrs. Trump’s said to have achieved in the first year of her husband’s second term. It’s a Manchurian Candidate-like add-on after the portrait of Melania’s kindness and bravery. But the tacked-on roll-call of supposed do-goodings just accentuates Melania as the nadir of uncritical celebrity docs.

No matter how much garish streamer-quality lighting Ratner throws at the First Lady, the film reflects the many preconceptions of Melania Trump that one might bring to the film. Melania aims to humanize its subject with this insider’s view, but it’s ultimately confirmation she’s an vapid ice queen with nothing insightful to say. But besides being the laziest kind of propaganda, it’s also just bad PR spin. At least Leni Riefenstahl could make a decent shot.

Melania is now playing in theatres.

It is coming soon to Prime Video.

The post Melania Review: Trump Doc Fails to Be Best appeared first on POV Magazine.