From the first seconds of “Melania,” we know we’re watching a commercial: the camera swoops and glides over the luxury waterfront estate Mar-a-Lago, and then, back on the ground, a snakeskin stiletto emerges from an S.U.V. Visually, it’s slick but exceedingly mid. The director Brett Ratner cozied up to the Trumps after spending years in movie-biz exile amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault. (He has denied wrongdoing.) For his comeback, he has summoned all the artistic ambition of a local Realtor who just got a drone. Backed by the familiar chords of “Gimme Shelter,” the opening scene proposes a documentarian’s corollary to the rule about restaurants with a view: the spendier the soundtrack, the flatter the film. Throughout the hundred-and-four-minute run time, the shoe motif continues: Melania in heels watching television, alone; Melania in heels meeting a former hostage; Melania on a couch removing her heels at the end of a long day. After a while, “Melania” starts to feel like an OnlyFans account crossed with that meme of Kim Jong Un visiting factories. You can’t exactly blame Ratner for relying on a veneer of glamour. How do you capture a subject whose feet are more expressive than her personality?
Certainly, one would expect the film to offer a Melania-friendly take, given that Melania, an executive producer, had creative control, and that Amazon paid a record-breaking forty million dollars—twenty-eight of which Melania reportedly pocketed—in a rights deal that might have been brokered by Boss Tweed. (The second-highest bid, from Disney, came in about twenty-six million dollars lower.) Before long, we’ve left advertising behind for pure propaganda. We’re treated to a long, sombre scene of the First Couple at Arlington National Cemetery, knowing all the while that Trump views the war dead as “losers” and “suckers.” Then there’s a set piece of Melania presiding over a fitting for her Inauguration outfit—a big-screen “get ready with me,” in which she fusses over hat-brim angles and collar shapes as pin-cushion-bearing attendants applaud her taste. “No more turtleneck!” she decrees, eyes narrowing, as Ratner strains to make a “Rush Hour” out of rush alterations. Melania, a native of Slovenia, is an immigrant. So are Hervé Pierre, her French-born stylist, and Tham Kannalikham, an interior designer who arrived in the U.S. from Laos at the age of two, and who is seen reciting a putatively spontaneous ode to Trump’s Presidency and the American Dream. Her placid cameo would beggar belief at a moment when Melania’s husband is leading a violent mass-deportation campaign, if it didn’t constitute precisely the kind of taunting mindfuck at which Trumpworld excels.
The timing couldn’t be more infelicitous for “Melania,” which showed, at a private White House screening, just hours after Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti, on a Minneapolis street. A notably patchy crowd, including Amazon bosses, Queen Rania of Jordan, and Mike Tyson enjoyed a spread of dichromatic snacks, such as hurricane lamps filled with white gumballs and macarons that looked as though they were made of toothpaste and coal. The documentary’s unheard-of marketing budget of thirty-five million dollars has provided for personalized popcorn tubs in theatres and those ubiquitous posters whose fancy-lady graphic design brings to mind a boob-tape kit. As Jeff Bezos trashed the Washington Post and cut sixteen thousand jobs at Amazon, people who worked on the film made themselves conspicuously scarce; according to Rolling Stone, two-thirds of them asked to be removed from the credits. Then, the same day the movie opened, Ratner turned up in photographs from the latest batch of Epstein files, sharing a couch with the sex offender and two female companions.
Yet, as hagiography, “Melania” is strangely self-defeating. We are told, for instance, that Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs, is an avid videographer, but the film is devoid of baby pictures, family mementos, or any of the other low-hanging archival materials that typically serve to humanize a distant subject. She is a woman without a past, effacing biography just as her husband erases national history. (As I noted in 2016, their four-hundred-and-fifty-person wedding included all of three guests from Melania’s homeland: her mother, her father, and her sister.) Melania says that everything she does is for “the children,” but no actual children appear in “Melania.” Nor do pets, friends, hobbies, or music, except in a sad little scene in which she struggles to sing along to “Billie Jean,” supposedly her favorite song. You almost wince when her towering adult son, Barron, brushes her off without so much as a peck on the cheek.
We can only conclude that “Melania” portrays Melania in exactly the way she wants to be seen: as rigid, formal, solitary, dourly materialistic; surrounded by lackeys drafted into the closest thing to intimacy that she seems able to access; grinding through bot-like voice-overs filled with awkward gerunds and stilted exposition. Aviva Siegel, a former Hamas hostage, visits Trump Tower to lobby for her spouse’s liberation, only to become a prop in Melania’s vanity project. The encounter begs for gravity, but Melania turns it into another fashion moment, complimenting Siegel’s T-shirt, which features her captive husband’s image, and telling her that he’s “beautiful.” In another scene, we catch glimpses of the Los Angeles fires on TV—another world event passing by like so much B-roll between wardrobe changes.
The life is barren, the glory borrowed. When Melania attends Jimmy Carter’s funeral, the camera lingers on the crowds, as though they’d come out for her. “The love my parents shared for fifty-seven years was the foundation of our home,” Melania says, in a rare sentimental aside, conjuring marital devotion by proxy. The most genuine bits of the film involve her grief for her mother, Amalija Knavs, who died in 2024. “My beloved mother was the richest thread in my life,” Melania says, as she walks down the aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which seems to have been privatized so that she can light a candle. As with any scene that relies on Melania for emotional impact, it requires some juicing, this time with Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The choice seems vaguely trolling, given the song’s associations with the civil-rights movement and, more recently, Barack Obama. Call it spiritual appropriation, simulating the soul that is so conspicuously lacking onscreen.
Cameras followed Melania in the twenty days leading up to Trump’s second Inauguration. About nineteen of them seem to have been devoted to planning Melania’s big event, a candlelit dinner for MAGA backers and bagmen, including Bezos. Chef Chris’s menu opens with a “golden egg and caviar,” an event planner says. At this point, you think that “Melania” has broken the fourth wall, that the far-too-obvious symbolism is about to be acknowledged and then punctured or dismissed. But, no, the gilded hors d’œuvres are for real, even if, as a metaphor, they are at best incomplete. With “Melania,” you get the brittle shell, but none of the rich internal goo that makes for a compelling portrait.
The First Couple’s marriage, never outwardly loving, comes across as particularly arid on the rare occasions when they interact. “That’s a good one, congrats,” Melania says, over the phone on Election Night, as Trump crows about his victory. “I will see it on the news.” Her husband may as well have won a bowling tournament. One wonders whether she’s exacting payback for the time, in 2018, when, in a tweet welcoming her home from the hospital after a minor procedure, he accidentally called her Melanie. As for the dinner, Melania asserts that the theme is “white and gold.” To her credit, that’s a fairly apt encapsulation of the entire Trumpist project.
“It’s . . . cinematic,” Melania declared, struggling, at a press call, to come up with three words to describe “Melania.” This is like calling food “culinary,” or sports “athletic,” but, in addition to being redundant, it reflects the film’s failure to decide what genre it’s working in. Tracking shots of S.U.V. convoys and grainy faux-camcorder effects—not to mention a lugubrious theme song called “Melania’s Waltz”—seem copped from “Succession.” (Except in “Succession” you get acid banter during the rides; Melania says so little that she might rival Charlie Chaplin for achievement in silent film.) The rote voice-overs bring to mind reality shows, as does an “Apprentice”-lite sequence of Melania interviewing candidates for a job on her staff: “Hayley, you could bring Gabrielle in, please?”
You wonder if Melania, as part of some sort of marital bargain, simply demanded a show of her own—it was not all that long ago, after all, that the personal section of her website boasted of her “numerous television commercials,” most recently alongside “one of America’s top icons, the Aflac duck.” Despite legendarily low ticket sales in some regions, the film managed to earn a respectable seven million dollars or so domestically on opening weekend, not that it’s anywhere close to being profitable for Amazon, in the strictly economic sense. Whatever “Melania” is, and whatever numbers it ends up doing, it will never be able to compete, for sheer reach, with the sickening scenes that the Trump regime’s ICE is starring in day after day. Coming soon, to a street corner near you. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated what is known about the circumstances of Alex Pretti’s death.