‘Melania’ Review: Brett Ratner’s First Lady Documentary is a Cheeseball Infomercial of Straggering Inertia
“Melania” is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called “Day of the Living Tradwife.”
The movie was shot, by director Brett Ratner and a trio of prestige cinematographers, over the course of the 20 days leading up to (and including) the 2025 Presidential Inauguration of Donald Trump. And to the extent that it allows Melania Trump a whisper of personality or agency, it’s as a designer. She helps to tweak the design of her own outfits. She has chosen the color of the inaugural invitation envelopes (a lovely shade of scarlet). She offers design tips about the plates and flowers and glassware. And, during the first Trump presidency, she helped redesign sections of the White House.
All of this plays out, in “Melania,” as if she’s planning her wedding. The movie opens to the strains of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” which makes it sound like the film is going to strike an attitude of defense against those who have been mean to Melania. But no, “Melania” is so studiously celebratory, like a piece of state-sanctioned propaganda out of 1960s Communist China, that it never even wades into those controversial waters.
The movie plunks us down at Mar-a-Lago, where Melania struts out the door and into the back of an SUV, which will take her to the red-and-white blue private plane painted with the word TRUMP that’s waiting for her at the airport. Wherever she lands, she’s in a mobile bubble, jetting from the palace of Palm Beach to Trump Tower in New York, where she meets for a fashion fitting in what looks like a dining room of the Titanic designed by Liberace, then to St. Patrick’s Cathedral right down the block (where she attends an anniversary mass for her mother) and on to the renovated 19th-century charm of Blair House in Washington, D.C., then back to Trump Tower and back to the Capital.
Melania came out of Slovenia as a teenage fashion model, but she was always less Brooke Shields than Nico, and now, at 55, in her Terminator sunglasses and thick mascara eyelashes and omnipresent four-inch pumps (she wears them in every scene, even when she’s just relaxing on the couch), she still has that frozen-for-the-camera hauteur, as well as the thick accent that blankets everything she says, giving it all the same emotional neutrality. “Can we do the lapel a little bit beeger?” she asks her designer, Hervé Pierre, and he, like everyone else in the room, reacts with a grin of jovial agreement, as if Marie Antoinette had just asked for a piece of cake. The movie is stitched together by Melania narrating her life in voice-over, most of it along the lines of “This is my last flight as a private citizen, before stepping back into my public life” or “The people I like have to share my vee-sion.”
On the surface, the movie seems purged of politics, even though Donald Trump is in it plenty, mostly during the inauguration scenes that take up the second half. He walks from event to event holding hands with Melania, who knows just how to comport herself — as America’s First Arm Candy. She and her husband have been together long enough now that they have matching scowls, and matching frozen robot grins.
Yet the politics is there, a touch ominously, in the very absence of politics, in how studiously upbeat and controlled the movie is. Made for an outrageously high budget ($40 million, plus $35 million spent on marketing), with a director who’d effectively been canceled over accusations of sexual abuse and was in no position to do anything but what he was told (that is, to be directed), the film, in its junk-streaming prefab-day-in-the-life reality-show way, mirrors the control of the Trump administration. Its very existence is a pure expression of that control. By the time “Melania” arrives at the Inaugural festivities, the film has given itself over to a series of rituals (the candlelight dinner, the Inaugural itself, the luncheon, the Starlight Ball), which feels weirdly fitting since the filmmaking itself is so ritualized. It never lets the air of experience in. And that should tell you something. “Melania,” like the Trump regime, is a designed-from-the-top-down reality show that’s devoted to shutting reality out.
The movie was shot, by director Brett Ratner and a trio of prestige cinematographers, over the course of the 20 days leading up to (and including) the 2025 Presidential Inauguration of Donald Trump. And to the extent that it allows Melania Trump a whisper of personality or agency, it’s as a designer. She helps to tweak the design of her own outfits. She has chosen the color of the inaugural invitation envelopes (a lovely shade of scarlet). She offers design tips about the plates and flowers and glassware. And, during the first Trump presidency, she helped redesign sections of the White House.
All of this plays out, in “Melania,” as if she’s planning her wedding. The movie opens to the strains of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” which makes it sound like the film is going to strike an attitude of defense against those who have been mean to Melania. But no, “Melania” is so studiously celebratory, like a piece of state-sanctioned propaganda out of 1960s Communist China, that it never even wades into those controversial waters.
The movie plunks us down at Mar-a-Lago, where Melania struts out the door and into the back of an SUV, which will take her to the red-and-white blue private plane painted with the word TRUMP that’s waiting for her at the airport. Wherever she lands, she’s in a mobile bubble, jetting from the palace of Palm Beach to Trump Tower in New York, where she meets for a fashion fitting in what looks like a dining room of the Titanic designed by Liberace, then to St. Patrick’s Cathedral right down the block (where she attends an anniversary mass for her mother) and on to the renovated 19th-century charm of Blair House in Washington, D.C., then back to Trump Tower and back to the Capital.
Melania came out of Slovenia as a teenage fashion model, but she was always less Brooke Shields than Nico, and now, at 55, in her Terminator sunglasses and thick mascara eyelashes and omnipresent four-inch pumps (she wears them in every scene, even when she’s just relaxing on the couch), she still has that frozen-for-the-camera hauteur, as well as the thick accent that blankets everything she says, giving it all the same emotional neutrality. “Can we do the lapel a little bit beeger?” she asks her designer, Hervé Pierre, and he, like everyone else in the room, reacts with a grin of jovial agreement, as if Marie Antoinette had just asked for a piece of cake. The movie is stitched together by Melania narrating her life in voice-over, most of it along the lines of “This is my last flight as a private citizen, before stepping back into my public life” or “The people I like have to share my vee-sion.”
On the surface, the movie seems purged of politics, even though Donald Trump is in it plenty, mostly during the inauguration scenes that take up the second half. He walks from event to event holding hands with Melania, who knows just how to comport herself — as America’s First Arm Candy. She and her husband have been together long enough now that they have matching scowls, and matching frozen robot grins.
Yet the politics is there, a touch ominously, in the very absence of politics, in how studiously upbeat and controlled the movie is. Made for an outrageously high budget ($40 million, plus $35 million spent on marketing), with a director who’d effectively been canceled over accusations of sexual abuse and was in no position to do anything but what he was told (that is, to be directed), the film, in its junk-streaming prefab-day-in-the-life reality-show way, mirrors the control of the Trump administration. Its very existence is a pure expression of that control. By the time “Melania” arrives at the Inaugural festivities, the film has given itself over to a series of rituals (the candlelight dinner, the Inaugural itself, the luncheon, the Starlight Ball), which feels weirdly fitting since the filmmaking itself is so ritualized. It never lets the air of experience in. And that should tell you something. “Melania,” like the Trump regime, is a designed-from-the-top-down reality show that’s devoted to shutting reality out.