Melania Trump, first lady of the United States, called “Melania,” the documentary about her life now playing in theatres, “purposeful storytelling,” and “a very deliberate act of authorship inviting you to witness events and emotions through a window of rich imagery.”
In plain English that means the film is a carefully curated look at one of the most famous people on Earth.
“Everyone wants to know, so here it is,” she says in the film’s opening minutes. “Twenty days in my life… family, business, philanthropy, and becoming First Lady of the United States… again.”
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“Melania,” which dropped onto 3,300 theatres worldwide this weekend, the kind of opening usually reserved superheroes in capes and not documentaries about newsmakers in stilettos, invites us to step into Mrs. Trump’s high heels in the twenty days leading up to the 2025 presidential inauguration. There are golden eggs filled with caviar to be inspected, inaugural-ball dresses to be fitted and world leaders to meet.
Trouble is, this chronicle of those twenty heady days feels like it’s twenty years long.
Poorly paced by director Brett Ratner, in his first film since being accused of sexual misconduct in 2017 — accusations he denies — the doc feels like a series of scenes randomly thrown together, like mismatched puzzle pieces forced together to form a whole.
The episodic moments, like a Zoom call with Brigitte Macron, or a fitting for the famous fedora she wore at the inauguration, reveal little. As perfectly manicured as her fingernails, the doc is slickly shot but feels orchestrated rather than a work of journalism or even an interesting portrait of a person in the waning moments of private life before stepping into the glare of one of the brightest spotlights on the planet.
We don’t get a sense of the enormity of the events surrounding Melania despite the bromides she spouts in the ever-present narration, which is delivered with all the enthusiasm of an educational video. We learn she lives everyday with “purpose and devotion” and that she will, “move forward with purpose, and of course, style,” but every word out of her mouth feels scripted for maximum effect.
Some critics have compared “Melania” to a reality show, but to call this a reality television style film does a disservice to reality television, who, for the most part, understand how to maintain viewer interest.
The situations in “Melania” may be as contrived as anything you’d see on “Vanderpump Rules,” but without any sense of drama. There is a great and gripping story here to be told, but Ratner makes some truly bizarre choices in terms of what to highlight.
Meetings with Queen Rania of Jordan and Brigitte Macron come across as self-congratulatory, yielding little in terms of news you can use and the inauguration scenes, which eat up the film’s final half hour, don’t offer any insight, just platitudes about “a new era for America.”
These are linked together by long sequences of motorcades and Mrs. Trump walking. And walking. She strides through St. Patrick’s Cathedral, through her gilded Trump Tower apartment, traipses through Mar-a-Lago, across airport runways to private planes and at the side of her husband as the camera dutifully follows along.
So many walking scenes, and yet, the doc never goes anywhere.
Authorized documentaries, or those made with the subject’s approval, are a tricky beast. The line between curiosity and marketing is stretched thin, and maybe never as thin as Ratner and Company pull it in this infomercial/vanity project.
“Melania’s” look at its subject’s life feels more like an exercise in get-to-know-me promotion, or a set-up for a lifestyle show on Amazon Prime, than a film with any real interest in the first lady or her life.
