AS A GENERAL RULE, my theory of criticism is that the only thing that really matters is the work on the screen. Producer is corrupt? Director has been hit by sexual harassment claims? Star is embroiled in tabloid drama because they have ties to a sexually deviant blackmailer who flew people to his private island? Not really germane to the action on the screen.
But Melania is hard to separate from the off-screen nonsense as it only exists because of the off-screen nonsense. Just to briefly recap the ways in which this movie is . . . odd:
Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights to make Melania, a deal the Wall Street Journal reported came about after a dinner between Jeff Bezos (who has, shall we say, multiple interests of great value that could be hurt or helped by Donald Trump’s White House) and the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago. Melania’s cut of that pie? Seventy percent.
Bezos and company have spent another $35 million advertising the film, which, as I noted in Morning Shots yesterday, means that it needs to recoup about $150 million at the box office to break even. And while there is a case to be made for conservative documentarians being an undervalued cinematic niche—a lot of dupes out there find great value in Dinesh D’Souza’s work—it is not a “$150 million worldwide haul” niche.
The director of the film, Brett Ratner—who was introduced to Trump by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin—was forced out of Hollywood in disgrace after the Los Angeles Times in 2017 reported allegations that he forced actress Natasha Henstridge to perform oral sex on him and masturbated in front of Olivia Munn without her permission. (Ratner would later claim to have had sex with Munn, humiliating her further, before admitting that was a lie. He denies the more salacious allegations and has not faced criminal charges.)
A photo of Ratner was included in the Epstein files, though his relationship to the pedophilic blackmailer is unclear. Just as it is unclear what Melania and Donald Trump’s relationship to the pedophilic blackmailer is, given the DOJ’s refusal to release all of the Epstein files.
Ratner has attempted to parlay his relationship with Trump into a return to Hollywood writ large, using Trump’s leverage over Paramount’s father-son duo, Larry and David Ellison, to get a new Rush Hour film made.
All of which is to say that there is no reason for Melania to exist outside of rank corruption. The Trumps are using the power of the presidency to grift Jeff Bezos; Bezos hopes that this bribe will keep his companies safe from government interference; Ratner is worming his way into Trump’s good graces as a way to get past his own history of alleged sexual misconduct; and the Ellisons are putting up with Ratner’s return and potentially distributing a new Rush Hour in the hope that Trump will use his considerable influence to push the FTC toward allowing Paramount Skydance to swallow up Warner Bros. Discovery.
It’s all quite disgusting.
But is the documentary any good?
You see how we here at The Bulwark suffer for you, the reader? You see what we put ourselves through? If you haven’t signed up to become a paying Bulwark+ member just yet, maybe do so now to demonstrate that such immiseration is worth it, would you? I don’t think Jeff Bezos is going to be buying any pricey banner ads for Melania in this here newsletter after he reads what follows.
Well, no, it’s not any good—and that’s partly because “documentary” here is a category error. This isn’t a documentary, as the opening moments make plain, Melania entering the frame and hitting her marks while a camera swoops overhead and watches her enter her SUV, which we then track as it arrives at an airport, private jet waiting as “Gimme Shelter” and then “Billy Jean” play in rapid succession. The term “documentary” is all wrong for something this stage-managed, this carefully put together.
No, this is reality TV with a hint of HBO’s long-defunct series Entourage, a strange combination of lifestyle porn and hagiography with the barest hints of public policy flitting around at the edges like fruit flies circling a moldy melon. Keeping Up With the Kardashians by way of Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, and the White House, say, albeit one that looks better than any reality TV show I’ve seen.1
Set in the period between the re-election of Donald Trump and his second inauguration, Ratner’s camera follows the once and future first lady as she does all the things a first lady does: obsess over her hat brim’s straightness, ensure that the tablecloths and plates for the billionaires at the donor’s ball match the marble of the National Building Museum, and chit-chat with other first ladies about limiting screen time for teenagers. I don’t want to downplay all of her work here—there is a genuinely moving sequence with a survivor of October 7th whose husband was still being held hostage by Hamas when filming took place—but this is not a film that is particularly interested in Melania’s absurdly named Be Best campaign.
No, the film’s real interest is in the clothes and the glitz and the style; Ratner lovingly shoots Melania from the heels up, so routinely tracking her high-heeled feet up to her torso that one can’t help but feel as if he’s auditioning to be Quentin Tarantino’s second unit director. We learn all about the seams of her inaugural gown (it’s going to be in the Smithsonian one day, don’t you know) and how smart she is about clothes. It’s true: she’s a former model (it’s how she got her Einstein visa, don’t you know) and quite pretty and knows how to flatter herself.
And she is her biggest concern, for sure. The most telling sequence in the film doesn’t come when she’s chatting with an interior designer who immigrated from Laos, though it was infuriating to watch these two talk about being American success stories in the midst of a nationwide ICE crackdown on immigrants, legal and otherwise. No, it came during a sequence in which Melania and Donald go to Jimmy Carter’s funeral. And Melania spends the entire time focused on . . . her own mother, who passed away a year prior to Carter’s death.
Now look: Grief hits people differently and I would never presume to judge how someone grieves. But spending the whole of Carter’s funeral musing about your own mother—making the whole thing about yourself, never once mentioning even something as uncontroversial as Carter’s work for Habitat for Humanity—displays an almost jaw-dropping level of solipsism. I can’t say I’m surprised Melania didn’t pay tribute to Carter; the former president said mean things about Donnie T, and one wouldn’t want to risk infuriating the current occupant of the White House by shedding a tear for someone who didn’t bend the knee and kiss the ring. It was, however, bizarre to watch.
Look: This movie’s not for me. If you’re reading this at The Bulwark, it’s probably not for you, either. The target audience seemed to enjoy it fine; the 12:40 p.m. showing at the AMC NorthPark in Dallas was 80 percent full and laughed in all the right places. It preaches to the faithful with great reverence and they were thrilled to bask in the golden glow of Trump Tower. But it’s fascinating to see so pure and naked an instrument of graft and propaganda deployed to great effect on an audience happy to lap it up.
I spoke with JVL about Melania yesterday, and the video just went up:
(Also available on YouTube.)
One must credit the cinematographers: Barry Peterson, Dante Spinotti (who earned Academy Award nominations for L.A. Confidential and The Insider), and Jeff Cronenweth (another two-time Oscar nominee, for The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). They’re, uh, making great use of their talents here.
Appropriated from a NYT commenter: “If they showed it on an airplane, viewers would still walk out.”
Nothing more phony than a reality show.
Trump probably likes Ratner's sexual misconduct, makes him a "real man."