Forty million dollars is an awful lot of money to spend on filming the back of a woman’s balayage as she gets in and out of Range Rovers for three weeks.
Not for Jeff Bezos. That, for whatever honest artistic or nefarious political reasons, is what Amazon has paid for the rights to distribute Melania, the new documentary – the most expensive ever made – charting the 20 days before Melania Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, and how the enigmatic First Lady seeks to “reinvent”, “elevate” and “break old norms” of the job of being Donald Trump’s wife.
Melania has been controversial from the moment it was announced. There’s the money – with an additional $35million budget for marketing – and the obvious fact that the project, with 55-year-old Melania herself serving as executive producer, is shameless propaganda.
There’s the unconscionable choice of director Brett Ratner, of Rush Hour fame, who has been excommunicated from Hollywood since six women accused him of sexual assault allegations in 2017 (no charges were brought). And there are the rumours of unrest on the production itself – Amazon mandated that no staff could opt out of the project for political reasons, two-thirds have reportedly removed their names from the credits, and many have made complaints about Ratner’s on-set behaviour.
It has been secretive – no advance press screenings have been held. The box office sales have reportedly been “soft” in the UK, despite Donald Trump’s insistence otherwise on Truth Social. At the showing I went to, four people in the seven-strong audience were journalists. And the timing could not be worse.
The United States is a country in turmoil, with the president threatening to take over Greenland and two people fatally shot by federal forces in Minnesota amid mass protests of an immigration crackdown. This glitzy documentary is simultaneously in horrible bad taste, and a news event promising to shed light on one of the most powerful women in the world.
Donald Trump and Melania Trump at the ‘Melania’ premiere (Photo: Craig Hudson/Variety)For a few moments, as Melania’s opening scene swept us over the beach at Mar-a-Lago and zoomed in on a snakeskin Louboutin stiletto with Mick Jagger wailing along to “Gimme Shelter”, I was afraid that Ratner might have delivered a work of glamorous, self-aware high camp that I might have to report that I enjoyed.
This was swiftly kiboshed, however, as Melania’s voiceover – as monotone as her wardrobe – kicked in. She introduces herself “navigating the complexities of life” and takes us into a suite at Trump Tower overlooking Central Park, as she and a group of sycophantic seamstresses compare different shades of navy blue.
What follows are a series of loose and mostly unconnected diary events from January 2024. Melania is fitted for a ballgown, Melania assesses the champagne coupes for a candlelit dinner and the “beautiful shades of greige” for the White House interiors, Melania hires her new staff, Melania has a Zoom call with Brigitte Macron about “children”, all while explaining how detail oriented and fashion conscious and focused on her initiatives she is.
If there was any reflection whatsoever into the messages she intends to project with her fashion, how she feels about hosting thousands of people at official events, how and why she has redecorated the White House, what she looks for in the team around her and what she expects them to do, or the reasons behind her chosen philanthropic causes, this might threaten to be a film of substance. Alas it – beautifully shot, and with a killer soundtrack featuring Spandau Ballet, Tears for Fears, and Michael Jackson, Melania’s favourite – is all style. (The only takeaway about her style is that she likes the colours black and white.)
We travel on Trump Force One as the Slovenian-born former model jets between New York, Washington and Mar-a-Lago, which she calls her “refuge from the outside world”. Watching this, in which opulence is everywhere, it is very difficult to imagine she was ever in it.
The real world is ignored, with some vulgarity, but when reality does encroach, it is with detachment: she watches the California wildfires on TV with sympathy from a luxuriant sofa (it may as well be an ivory tower), attends the funeral of Jimmy Carter and is reminded of her own mother’s death a year before, and meets a freed Israeli hostage, Aviva Siegel, fighting for her husband Keith to be released from Gaza.
That scene is moving and as emotional as Melania gets – and Trump helped secure her husband’s rescue days after he was sworn in – and Melania displays warmth and compassion in the face of raw distress. But you would have to be a monster not to. Nowhere else do we see her bond, there is no suggestion of any friendships, we don’t see anything candid or vulnerable or even, really, human.
Donald Trump and Melania Trump at one of several inaugural balls (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)Which is not to say she comes across as badly as she quite obviously must be, given her marriage – she seems nice, composed, and articulate – she is just not interested in letting anyone in. Even in the long sequence at St Patrick’s Cathedral, as she pays tribute to her late mother and discusses her ongoing grief, she does not share details about what she was like or display emotion of any kind.
This is true of the whole film, which instead of a personal portrait or a reflection on her experiences in the White House and how they changed her, how she feels about a second term, her nerves about the inauguration and returning to a life of duty, is really a string of platitudes. About America, about her husband, about fallen soldiers, about the momentousness of returning to the White House, about the immigrant experience.
In Washington she “felt the weight of history intertwined with my own journey as an immigrant” (given the anger and despair of American immigrants at the moment, this feels especially crass). At Arlington National Cemetery she is humbled by the servicemen and women defending her rights and reminded that we are all “bound by humanity”. Inauguration Day was “so rich with meaning”.
Those of us who watched news coverage of the day are forced to relive much of that rich meaning again here, with a bonus shot of Kamala Harris checking her watch. Each moment of that 22-hour media opp, Melania insists, was “filled with historic purpose”. Conspiracy theorists who accuse her of being a body double or dead will have to concede that from the way this woman speaks, it is obvious she has spent several decades around the bluster of Donald Trump. Whom, if it wasn’t obvious enough, we learn little about.
We see one conversation in which he drones on and she tries to get him off the phone, another in which she wryly offers edits for his inaugural speech (which he reluctantly takes). I did enjoy hearing them catch up about 19-year-old Barron, the president revealing “I love him, he’s cute, we have cute conversations” to his wife, as if discussing a neighbour’s toddler rather than their own nearly adult son.
Melania is worse than a bad film – it’s a boring one. A documentary must have failed its subject if you come away less curious about them than before, and I found myself much more interested in the people around the First Lady, those desperate for proximity to her gilded cage, than the woman herself. The White House staff, the drivers, the stylists, the young women interviewing for jobs in the East Wing.
A documentary must have failed its subject if you wind up wanting to hear more from her husband. Which is the worst part of all: in the hope of comedy, in the hope of drama, in the hope of a twist, I watched Melania and found myself wishing there had been more of Donald Trump.
‘Melania’ is in cinemas now
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