![](\"https:\/\/pyxis.nymag.com\/v1\/imgs\/ec0\/c27\/1c31e2df1ddae7ec1d811a07d8838cc446-Melania-Lede.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
\n <\/div>\n\n This is what we get for putting up with all those subject-approved portraits of famous people. We did this to ourselves. Not the second Trump presidency, though our representative democracy, however flawed, would hold that that\u2019s on us as well. It\u2019s Melania I\u2019m talking about, the film about Slovenian-American fashion model turned First Lady Melania Trump, which arrived in theaters yesterday on a wave of infamy. Melania \u2014 made by Brett Ratner<\/a>, a Hollywood hack who hasn\u2019t directed since 2014 due to multiple allegations of sexual assault that emerged at the height of the MeToo movement \u2014 attracted a lot of attention for the $40 million that distributor Amazon paid for it, an unprecedented amount for a documentary even before you take into account that the company spent almost as much again on marketing<\/a>. That eye-popping price looked less like an investment and more like a hefty tribute offered up to a corrupt strongman. Melania doesn\u2019t stand a chance of making that amount back at the box office<\/a>, but it doesn\u2019t need to. It could play to thousands of empty houses all weekend and still be a success by the perverse metrics that led to its production.<\/p>\n The theater at my Union Square multiplex last night was maybe 40 percent full, and judging from the bursts of applause and occasional jeers, the crowd was made up with as many Donald Trump fans as hate watchers. This shouldn\u2019t have come as any sort of surprise. Melania, which tracks its subject over the 20 days leading up to the 2025 inauguration, isn\u2019t a MAGA screed arriving with raised middle fingers aimed at everyone who isn\u2019t ready to get on board with its gilt-rimmed regime \u2014 though it can\u2019t resist a few digs at the outgoing Biden administration by way of shots of a dazed-looking Joe and an exasperated Kamala Harris. Its aims are quieter and more insidious. Instead of leaning into the political, it insistently takes the form of a glossy celebrity documentary<\/a>, a genre that\u2019s become omnipresent and that we\u2019ve been increasingly primed to accept even though it often consists of brand building exercises masquerading as movies. (The Beckham family docs, Lady Gaga or Selena Gomez\u2019s projects, Arnold.) It attempts to enshrine Melania as the kind of figure everyone is so desperate to get more of that they\u2019d endure this extravagantly boring experience made up of endless treks from black car to private plane to meeting to black car.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone wants to know, so here it is,\u201d Melania says at the start of Melania, kicking off a wooden narration full of awkward platitudes. This is a fascinatingly bold claim from a woman who showed no discernible signs of public personality throughout her husband\u2019s first term in office, and whose legacy from that period consists mainly of goth Christmas decor<\/a> and a confoundingly named public interest campaign<\/a> with aims no one she meets with on screen appears to understand. And what, precisely, does everyone want to know? That Melania has very exacting taste in blouse necklines? That she loves white and gold as a color combination? That she\u2019s a fan of Michael Jackson? This is the sort of previously forbidden knowledge that Melania deigns to let us in on. There\u2019s a formula here, one that\u2019s been ingrained into us by countless hours of accepting hagiographic movies and series offering subject-approved glimpses into the private selves of various famous people. These properties make promises about unprecedented access, but of course, everything we see is highly controlled and mediated, and in exchange for overlooking that fact, we\u2019re treated to a few carefully doled out instances of real vulnerability.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the bargain Melania nominally tries to strike as well, though it\u2019s unable to offer convincing proof that there is anything going on beneath Melania\u2019s impeccably manicured surface. Her voiceover is a numbing litany of meaningless observations and claims like \u201cFor me, it\u2019s important that timeless elegance shines through every element of the inauguration\u2019s decor, style, and design.\u201d She is never seen in anything less than full hair and makeup, and she appears to only be capable of two facial expressions \u2014 a professional smile and a neutral face. At one point, Ratner shoots her watching news of the Los Angeles fires, and zooms in on her eyes as though he could create visible emotion there through sheer force of will.<\/p>\n Ratner, who never appears on screen, does sometimes speak up behind the camera, and during one especially surreal moment, goads Melania into singing along to \u201cBillie Jean\u201d with him during a car ride with desperation that speaks to how little workable material he realizes that he\u2019s getting. An attempt to humanize the First Lady by showcasing her grief over the loss of her mother the year before instead ends up feeling mystifyingly unconvincing, maybe because the scene in which Melania visits St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral to light a candle is so slickly filmed that it looks like a commercial. When one of the priests offers Melania a blessing, she accepts with the exact tone someone would use when offered a warm towel on an airplane.<\/p>\n The gap between Melania\u2019s insistently anodyne tone and what\u2019s happened in the year since it was filmed can become downright vertiginous, especially when Melania intones observations about her immigrant journey and how \u201ceveryone should do what they can to protect our individual rights.\u201d But the people who\u2019ll seek out Melania aren\u2019t going to care about how distant it is from or contradictory it is to our brutal realities, or care about how little it delivers in terms of manufactured intimacy. Because the sort of celebrity documentary that Melania has been made in the image of aren\u2019t made for general audiences \u2014 they\u2019re made for fans who treat the experience of viewing them as another act of devotion to their idols.<\/p>\n Melania can\u2019t, despite its efforts, make its subject look like the movie star it tries to pretend she is, but she\u2019s not the reason people will buy tickets. They\u2019ve come to see her husband, who saunters in occasionally and, I hate to admit it, considerably livens up the proceedings because he knows how to play to a camera. There\u2019s small consolation to the fact that Trump, who\u2019s posted about having seen the movie twice, surely finds it as tedious an experience as I did. Melania has been described as having an audience of one, but that intended viewer\u2019s taste runs more toward Ratner\u2019s earlier work, and Rush Hour 4 is going to be a lot harder to manifest than this vanity project.<\/p>\n A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
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