She seems very alone and aloof. Despite the constant presence of staff, almost always seen at a distance, only her security detail and her clothiers get physically close to her. She’s polite and greets everyone, even the lift guy. Melania walks alone, confident in towering heels, stone-faced. A woman so used to masking her feelings, that the mask is all there is.
Her flat voiceover contains platitudes about ‘Murica, her philanthropy, her husband, her philanthropy (in case you missed it the first time), her father (who slightly resembles her husband, unnervingly) and her mother who, we’re reminded – as the Trumps head to president Jimmy Carter’s funeral – had died a year previously. Way to pull focus back on you, Melania.
Her mum had liked St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, so Melania goes there, and becomes the focus of a rather creepy priest. She bats him off effortlessly: easy. She does say some vaguely relatable things about grief, but there’s no original thought there. Perhaps Michelle Obama already said it?
Melania the film
Melania’s father liked to make family Super8 videos. Great idea, hire someone to film some wobbly hand-held Super8 clips at the important public events: the ones where you’d prefer a documentary crew to keep it in focus.
Melania is said to have personally chosen director Brett Ratner rather than an experienced documentary filmmaker. Donald Trump is a known Rush Hour fan, a film which Ratner directed. His career stalled following sexual misconduct allegations – which Ratner denies – and he features in a newly-released photo with Jeffrey Epstein.
Melania’s said to have been paid $28mn of the £75mn costs ($40mn budget, plus a $35mn marketing campaign), funded by keen philanthropist, Jeff Bezos.
Melania is still showing in limited UK cinemas. Don’t all rush at once.
Setting the scene
It’s Trump Inauguration 2.0, minus 20 days. Melania’s in a fleet of cars, in a Trump jet, in more cars, criss-crossing the eastern US to attend excruciatingly stilted ‘meetings’ with various designers, including her clothes designer (the only person in this film who might be having any fun). She obsesses about every tiny detail of her clothes, even though she’s complained in the past about media focus on her attire.
This is no warts-and-all reveal. No sweaty workouts behind that slim figure, no bad hair, no make-up free moments. Everything is curated. Melania’s so completely conscious of being looked at from every angle that she has learned to give nothing away. Every second on screen, she is immaculately presented, heavily made-up, couture-dressed and utterly self-aware down to the last practised smile.
Melania wears sunglasses in the car in winter and claims to love Michael Jackson but doesn’t know the words to her favourite song, Billie Jean. A trailer for a new film about Jackson prefaced this one. Subtle.
Melania is seen in over-gilded, over-decorated, migraine-inducing rooms in New York, Washington DC and Mar-a-Lago: all painted surfaces, mirrors, lights, flowers and convenient stairs for the camera to follow her vertiginous heels and well-turned ankles. It feels weirdly fetishistic.
It’s Mar-a-Lago where she claims to feel most relaxed – really? While there, she indulges in a game of charitable works Top Trumps – ha!– with Queen Rania of Jordan.
Family ties
The unavoidable husband enters as a disembodied voice. He’s on the phone, letting her (us) know about his landslide victory. It wasn’t. She hasn’t watched it on tv – “yet”, she insists.
As voiceovers in a car, the couple chat listlessly about their son, Barron, who seems to be playing the Greg role from Succession in this family. After the inauguration, all 6’9” of him turns left down a White House corridor, while his mother turns right, in a casual, ‘see you later’ moment. She’s had a 22hr day, she reminds us, rubbing her feet for emphasis. There’s not much familial closeness in evidence.
Donald Trump is ostentatiously proud of his wife (in contrast to his habitual “quiet, piggy” misogyny) as a reflection of his own good taste and status. She’s beautiful, she’s difficult, he says, as if she were a wild horse. They grip hands frequently in public, her manicured talons around his chubby paw: it feels possessive, or perhaps she’s his human walking cane. As they dance, her body subtly leans away, the air kisses never quite land. They are physically awkward together.
We don’t see any real intimacy in these family relationships. Melania remains restrained, distant, controlled.
The inauguration and beyond
The multiple inauguration events look like a gigantic jingoistic bore, but people-spotting was entertaining enough, as was yelling obscenities at the screen whenever Musk or Vance appeared. (I was the only person in the cinema. Not that it would have made a difference).
The Trumps’ return to the White House leaves a strong, unpleasant stench of entitlement, although the 5-hour turnaround window between exiting and incoming presidents’ effects provided a mildly diverting peek behind the curtain. Trump, gracious as ever, can’t resist some digs at the departing Bidens.
Who is Melania, though?
There seems an effort here to portray Melania as influential on her husband, in league with him, rather than the victim some would prefer to believe. In his speech rehearsal, Trump says he doesn’t want to use the word ‘warmonger’ – “I don’t like that word, ‘monger’” he says. Melania suggests a more diplomatic alternative. (Don’t they have staff for that sort of thing?) From her microbladed eyebrows to her stilettos, she radiates complicity.
Two brief snippets breathe some life into this stilted portrait: in full inauguration outfit, descending the stairs at surprising speed, I glimpsed her feet tucked into what looked like hotel room slippers. Then, coming out of the final inauguration event, she shimmies along to YMCA – another song where she only seems to know the title – her face briefly relaxes a little, she smiles and it looks real. It’s over, and her plans have been a success. Perhaps there’d be hell to pay at home, otherwise.
In a restless, unfulfilling hour and 44 minutes, I check the time, laugh inappropriately, shout rude words and sing along to some good tunes (I knew the words, Melania). Gimme Shelter at Mar-a-Lago? “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away”? Virginia Giuffre pops into my head.
The soundtrack seems to tell a different story than the visuals. I hope it was deliberately subversive. After all, about two-thirds of the crew asked for their names to be excised from the credits, and Jonny Greenwood has called for his music to be removed. At the end, the MGM lion flashed up on screen, with the words “an Amazon company” below its sadly roaring maw. Now, that was a tear-jerker.
Melania might be more interesting than she allows us to see, but Melania is like a designer vinyl sofa: slick, shiny and cold. It’s unengaging, unrevealing; it’s a Hollywood set, with tumbleweed behind the façade. And because we can see all that, it’s not even a worthy historical record. It’s too long, too performative, too nakedly self-serving: it’s an emotional vacudrama. I really don’t care, do u?
Additional background and research by Geoff Thompson.
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