Melania, Brett Ratner ’s Melania Trump movie, is a purportedly serious film that plays like a mockumentary. If you were making a movie that parodied the current first lady of the United States, I’m not sure what you’d do differently.
This interminable, nearly two-hour long film features a running voiceover by Melania, leading us through crucial moments in the twenty days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration: choosing fabric for her coat, making sure her dress is the right length, approving a design plan for the dinner, and perusing furniture for Barron’s future bedroom. (Sadly, we never get to see which chest of drawers she picks.) “My creative vision is always clear,” she intones, returning to that notion throughout.
This is a work of propaganda, but director Brett Ratner is no Leni Riefenstahl. Missing are the German filmmaker’s awe-inspiring visuals and hypnotic edits; instead, Ratner substitutes endless shots of the gaudy, excessive Trump aesthetic as Melania floats through Trump Tower, private jets, motorcades, and gala dinners until she lands at the White House. The doc’s opening shot is a panorama of Mar-a-Lago in all its gilded glory, accompanied by the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away,” Jagger’s voice promises.
Before he was exiled from Hollywood by sexual assault accusations (he has denied the claims), Ratner was best known for directing the Rush Hour movies—so I at least expected propulsive pacing and drama. No such luck: We might as well be watching gold paint dry.
It’s hard to tell whether Melania herself finds it all as dull as I did: she remains inscrutable through most of the film, her face frozen into an elegant mask. The only times she genuinely lights up are when Ratner coaxes her to sing along with her favorite song, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” and later while dancing to the Village People’s “YMCA” at an inaugural event. At several points Melania refers to the death of her mother with sadness, and even has the cameras trail her to St Patrick’s Cathedral, where she lights candles. But throughout, there is no perceptible change in her demeanor.
That departure could’ve been a great segue into a segment about Melania’s past—her childhood in Slovenia, her modeling career, background information that might give context to her transformation into Trump’s consort. But instead, the doc sticks with the minutiae of the march toward Trump’s second term. Unmentioned is the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol; instead, the camera just pans over images of the Capitol preparing for the inauguration—now a symbol of Trump’s triumphal power.
Some of the film’s behind the scene moments are mildly fascinating: we see Melania’s Chief of Staff gleefully rejecting a request for information about the exorbitant Amazon deal for this very doc from Puck’s Matt Belloni. At an inauguration dinner, the camera pans over Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Amazon’s own Jeff Bezos, as Melania explains that it’s the donors who made Trump’s second term possible.
Nearly everything Melania says in the film is a cliché— platitudes about upholding the constitution, “respect for others,” and how no matter where people come from, “we are bound by the same humanity.” But much of it feels particularly rich in light of the past year, or even the past week: in the Northeast Los Angeles neighborhood where I watched the movie, ICE has been actively picking off local gardeners and street vendors.
The small crowd in the theater with me, mostly middle-aged and elderly women, didn’t seem to care. They laughed appreciatively at a scene where the Trumps waited as the Bidens’ furniture was being moved out of the White House, and a woman in my row “oohed” at some of the First Lady’s fashion choices. With Ratner’s help, Melania seems to be framing herself as an enigmatic queen of the realm, the figurehead of an everlasting dynasty, with the White House as Versailles. It’s a fantasy that’s punctured as soon as I walk out of the theater, only to be greeted by a crowd of anti-ICE protesters.
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