Under a certain strain of authoritarianism, a regime-approved vanity movie wouldn’t even need to premiere in cinemas. Cars with roof-mounted megaphones would circle the towns, announcing mandatory showtimes in the public square. Subjects would dutifully file there to watch it, emitting laughter on cue, under the eye of armed enforcers.
But the United States doesn’t have a lot in the way of shared public spaces. And the administration’s goon squads are, of late, otherwise occupied. So it was with considerable effort that, on the day of its release, I took two trains and an Uber an hour to a suburban multiplex in New Jersey to catch a matinee screening of a documentary about the president’s third wife.
Marketed far and wide with the tantalizing tagline “A New Film,” Melania captures the first lady of the United States Melania Trump (née Melanija Knavs) in the 20 days before the second inauguration of her husband, Donald J. Trump. It was directed and co-produced (along with Melania Trump herself) by Brett Ratner, the director of Hollywood hits like Tower Heist and the Rush Hour films, who was exiled from Tinseltown in 2017 following a suite of sexual assault allegations (which he denies). Not exactly the kind of film that would normally pique my interest. Or, it would seem, anyone’s. In the days before release, images circulated of seat maps showing screenings all but unsold. Rumors circulated that some GOP clubs that bought out whole blocks of tickets were struggling even to give them away. This despite the president’s assertion that the movie was “selling out, fast.”
Given all these gloomy box office prognostications, I was surprised to find my midafternoon showing surprisingly well attended. It was an audience of mostly older filmgoers. The kind who talk through the proceedings and can’t scarf a handful of popcorn without succumbing to an extended fit of gurgled choke-coughing. These were true-blue Trumpites, who applauded when the president appeared on-screen, as if the message might somehow get back to him. When Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar popped up during a congressional luncheon, the guy behind barked, “Another piece of shit!” In other words: a crowd primed and pumped for a Melania Trump documentary. (And in fact, the film had an unusually strong opening weekend for a documentary, earning over $7 million.) Those of us who are, perhaps, a little less ideologically sympathetic might be forgiven for finding Melania was punishingly dull, and occasionally absurd.
What can be said, objectively, about Melania? Well, it is 104 minutes long. The Motion Picture Association of America has rated it P.G. for “some thematic elements.” It was shot using color cinematography. It includes a scene where Donald Trump paranoiacally grumbles that the 2025 College Football National Championship Game between Ohio State and Notre Dame was scheduled at the same time as his inauguration broadcast as a deliberate affront to him.
As promised, Melania’s cameras trail the first lady as she prepares to renew her post at the Oval Office. She meets with designers and is fitted for Inauguration Day suits and gowns. She plans a menu for a black-tie dinner for the Trump campaign’s biggest donors, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. She meets with an October 7 hostage, to express condolences. She takes a Zoom call with first lady of France Brigitte Macron, where they discuss the importance of children. She is shuffled from boring meeting to boring meeting, boring motorcade to boring motorcade, boring gala to boring gala, boring ball to boring ball, flowing in and out of rooms, boringly. It makes watching paint dry look like the Super Bowl.
When it’s not boring, Melania is baffling. Early in the film, the Trumps attend President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral. In a more substantial kind of film, this scene might be an opportunity to reflect on these sorts of ceremonies, and the dignity the office of president is afforded, even in death. The filmmakers might even spare a few moments for thoughts on Carter, specifically. He seemed pretty generally well liked, after all. Instead, Melania and Ratner launch into an extended memorial for the first lady’s own deceased mother, who had passed away a year earlier. Losing a loved one is sad, of course. But the choice typifies something of the film’s Trumpian logic: Any event, even an event of historical significance, is only meaningful insofar as it serves as an opening to talk about one’s own life.
These weird decisions are scored by Melania’s insistent, wall-to-wall voiceover, which is so totally trite that it rarely meets the definition of insight. Her narration is crammed with sub-Hallmark groaners, like: “The only thing we can do is cherish moments with family and loved ones while they are still with it.” With her thick, accented English, such bromides can’t help but call to mind Tommy Wiseau, writer-producer-director-star of the cult classic comedy The Room, prone as he is to leaden clichés like, “If a lot of people love each other, the world would be a better place to live.”
Melania’s director-producer Ratner plays a kind of second fiddle, and comic relief. He never misses a chance to beam, from off-screen, stuff like, “I can’t believe right now we’re in the White House!” In one scene he literally says, “Sweet dreams, Mister President!” When he’s not gigglingly giddy, he attempts to drive the conversation, as a film director might, mining his subject for revealing psychological nuggets that might disclose something of her elusive personality. For example:
Brett Ratner: Who’s your favorite recording artist?
Melania Trump: Michael Jackson.
B.R.: What’s your favorite Michael Jackson song?
M.T.: “Billie Jean.”
B.R.: Oh, wow.
They then go on to duet a few bars of the 1983 single by Jackson, an artist whose own reputation was marred by accusations of … well, you know.
All of this might seem sort of funny, in that Room-like, so-bad-it’s-good way, were it not for the more imminent realities of the administration being inaugurated on-screen. One may be forgiven for sniffing when big-ticket Trump donors like Musk and Bezos sit down at their Melania-curated black-tie dinner and crack into golden eggs filled with caviar. Likewise, it is difficult to watch President Trump swear allegiance to a Constitution that he has regarded with utter contempt. And it is impossible to swallow Melania’s comments about the immigrant experience and the pursuit of the American dream—“No matter where we come from, we are bound by our same humanity” (!!!)—at a time when federal agents are snatching people off the streets on the mere suspicion that they may be foreign-born.
And speaking of which: As ICE goons warred with protesters in the streets of Minneapolis, Trump admin muckety-mucks and other cherished guests gathered at the newly renamed Trump-Kennedy Center for Melania’s red carpet premiere. The absolute disconnect between the world being presented on-screen and the one we see on the news (and, increasingly, through our windows) is so chasm-wide as to be truly crazy-making. Melania both depicts and is an example of the sort of shameless opulence one might associate with the reigns of Nicolae Ceaușescu or Saddam Hussein.
If nothing else, this movie is notable for how expensive it is. Melania sparked a bidding war between many of the biggest firms in the current media oligopoly. The honors went to Amazon MGM Studios, which reportedly budgeted $40 million for the film, with an additional $35 million spent on marketing. This makes Melania the most expensive documentary feature ever made, by a large margin. The money is not exactly (as they say in the biz) “up there on the screen.” Swooshing drone shots and footage treated to look like home movies can’t cover for the fact that Melania is completely bereft of creativity, or anything resembling artistic merit. It looks cheap. Of course, the same may well be said about Ratner’s earlier, likewise unstylish Hollywood movies. But at least those had Jackie Chan in them.
So it’s natural to wonder what exactly happened to those 75 million American dollars. Many have speculated that the film is little more than an attempt by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Trump’s administration. Amazon’s expenditure comes at a time when The Washington Post, the newspaper Bezos bought in 2013 and rebranded with the slogan “Democracy Dies In Darkness,” is planning major cutbacks. Anyone dopey enough to have bought the line that billionaire-backed media could provide an adequate bulwark against strongman authoritarianism may be a little disheartened to see how predictably this all played out.
Melania may also be notable for being the last major event to draw crowds to the (Trump) Kennedy Center, which the president has announced plans to shutter in order to make extensive—and, one imagines, horrendously garish—renovations. Such is the state of the arts under Trump, who recently leveled the cinema located in the White House’s East Wing to make space for a neo-Rococo ballroom.
That this is all playing out in the open, with such total brazenness, is another typical feature of Trump 2.0. It’s not just that this is some self-serving spectacle. It’s that it’s a bad, totally un-entertaining self-serving spectacle. Even as a political sop to a hungry base, it’s an insult: less “bread and circuses” and more “let them eat cake.” But, who knows? Maybe future generations will pore over the film. Not for its artistic, or even biographical merit. But as a key text in understanding one of the most flagrant, in-your-face cons ever perpetrated against the American Republic.
