The most interesting thing about Melania’s documentary? Donald Trump
In an age in which average human attention spans have slumped to
two-thirds of a minute, producing a documentary that aims to keep a mass audience engaged for just shy of two hours might seem a bold project. But Melania Trump — whether it’s her
daring fashion choices, her
plagiarised speeches, or her iconic swerves of her husband’s lips — is
nothing if not audacious.
Does she succeed in her latest ambitious undertaking? Alas, reader, she does not. I turned up at the Islington Vue for the opening night of
Melania feeling quite excited about the “
intimate look” behind the scenes at America’s famously private first lady I had been promised. I was ready for the opportunity to understand better the deep strangeness that binds her to
her husband; ready to tell you that you should give her and her film a chance and that there is more to her than ill-considered life and headwear choices. But I’m not sure Melania was really ready to let us in — I was left with a mixture of frustration, restlessness and mild discombobulation at the whole thing.
“Everyone wants to know, so here it is,” Melania starts in her trademark, princess-like Slovenian inflection, beginning a voiceover that forms one of two main audio backdrops to the film. (The other is a string of 1980s bangers, among them Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, which we see her singing along to and getting the words wrong at one point, and the striking choice of Tears for Fears’
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”.)
“Twenty days in my life — family, business, philanthropy and becoming First Lady of the United States . . . again.” She doesn’t sound altogether delighted with the “again” bit, and this elicits the first sniggers from the audience, which will crescendo over the course of the film, the “hahaha”s evolving into “pfft”s by the end. The three-row screen that the Vue had given to
Melania was, to my surprise, fully booked, the audience a ragtag bunch featuring three teenage girls and at least two pairs of Donald-and-Melania-alikes (or more accurately finance guys with central European girlfriends, one of whom described his partner to me as his “mini Melania”).
The cameras follow the soon-to-be first lady in the run-up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration as president in January 2025, with Melania having conceived and produced the film, as well as having chosen its soundtrack. Directed by Brett Ratner, best known for making the
Rush Hour action-comedy films, second-best known for the sexual assault allegations made against him by several women (which he denies), the film’s visuals are an explosion of the gold, greige and monochrome that define the Trumps’ aesthetic. But its content is largely dull and dreary, a sequence of glorified B-roll that gives an unreasonable amount of time to the back of Melania’s perfectly blow-dried head and to her getting in and out of various forms of transport in stiletto heels.
Two things have astonished me in recent days: one is that
Melania had the highest-grossing opening weekend for a non-concert documentary in more than a decade, grossing just over $7mn at the box office in the US and Canada. The other is that Amazon — which spent $35mn on marketing and bought the rights to the film for $40mn, $26mn more than the next-highest bidder — says it will release an accompanying three-part docuseries “with additional footage” on its Prime streaming service. Given the additional-footage-nature of the film, the mind boggles.
Having promised us a look at “family, business, philanthropy”, Melania proceeds to give us very little of the sort; the guiding principle of the docu-mercial seems to be “tell, don’t show”. She talks a lot about her dedication to children, but we are shown no evidence of that, while an interminable amount of time is given to her dedication to fashion as she makes minor tweaks to outfits with her stylists and designers. We get just a few brief glimpses of Melania’s only son, Barron Trump. “He’s cute,” Trump says at one point to his wife. “Yeah, I love him.” It’s as if they were discussing a household pet.
It is not clear why the first lady thought she should make this film. It would be easy to write it off as pure propaganda but, if it is, it is not very successful. The most interesting bits — and why, for me, it was just about worth sitting through — are the insights we get into the president, who seems to have genuine affection and even some degree of respect for his wife. In one particularly amusing episode, we see Trump becoming increasingly furious after being told by an adviser that the annual College Football National Championship will be broadcast on the same day as the inauguration. “I think they did it on purpose,” he seethes. Melania smiles trad-wife-ily.
On their first night back in the White House, it’s finally time for Melania to sit down after all that stomping in and out of cars. “She’s the most incredible first lady,” Trump says, gazing at her dotingly. “She’s very difficult, but there’s nobody like her,” he beams. On that, I cannot disagree.