And they are spectacularly bad
No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.
To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a “mother, wife, daughter, friend”, yet is only depicted preening and scowling. Figures like Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan appear to bolster Melania’s geopolitical credentials, yet time and again she returns to banal aphorisms. “Cherish your family and loved ones,” she implores audiences, who were, up until then, neglecting their family and despising their loved ones. Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness. Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving – with the country on the verge of an irreparable schism – the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau, or Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet.
Melania the book wasn’t an autobiography so much as a highly priced brochure. Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket. It’s a reminder that the richest people in the world are investing in entertainment brands not because they care about art but because the public does, and because all of these vanity projects and capitulations are a way to consolidate their own power and fortune. It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely “because we think customers are going to love it.”) It is also galling—to me at least—that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers.
I don’t want to blow anyone’s minds here or throw you off your balance when I inform you that the Melania documentary, now in theaters, is terrible.
The truth is, my soul left my body during the very first seconds of the film, when a drone shot over the ocean makes its way over the Mar-a-Lago grounds to Melania’s feet in heels, walking to her car as The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” plays. But my soul didn’t just escape and flee, which it would have been in its every right to do. No, it lingered, glaring at me the entire Melania running time with a mixture of disappointment and anger, like an owner would at their dog after it ate the garbage.”
“Last night, I left an empty chickpea can on my counter. When I came back 30 minutes later, small, black bugs had swarmed the tin and were crawling over my sink. I would rather relive that moment a hundred times over than have to watch another minute of the movie Melania.”
“Watching Melania get fitted for expensive clothes in gaudy rooms, or talk up how extravagantly staged she demands her balls be – and both happen a lot in Brett Ratner’s unrelentingly boring feature doc debut – only strengthen perceptions of her as a chilly, lifeless socialite wannabe… Melania is not the story of the First Lady of American politics, but the imagining of the first homeland monarch in U.S. history. This is not a film concerned at all with the America of today; it is propaganda that serves the formation of a future non-democracy.”
“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 wingnuts are all cheering the fact that the movie made $8 million on its opening night. However, there are numerous reports that the theatres were empty. I’m going to take a wild guess that somebody created a simple program to buy out theatres. After all, $8 million is chump change to someone with billions.
It just sounds so bad and is so openly a corrupt gesture to appease Trump (as if the wholesale destruction of the Washington Post weren’t enough) that it’s a historic documentary for all the wrong reasons. But it fits Melania perfectly: vapid, boring, elitist, cruel and venal.