The “Melania” movie is empty, foul and worse than we imagined

What do you get the woman who has everything — if “everything” constitutes a collection of ghastly hats, a Grinchian disdain for Christmas and a giant golden cage from which she manages the occasional stiff smile? Well, a documentary, of course! After all, what Melania Trump really needs is busywork. It’s not as if anything in American politics is more pressing for her right now than executive-producing a film about her life in the 20 days leading up to the 2025 presidential inauguration, simply called “Melania.”

As its one-word title suggests, “Melania” is as stilted and mind-numbing as its subject, an “intimate” glimpse of one of the world’s most talked-about women that couldn’t be more distant from human emotion if its interminable 104 minutes were just a blank screen with no picture. But it wouldn’t take a geopolitical genius to figure out that would be the result. Five minutes — heck, even one minute — spent watching Melania Trump speak would tell you all you need to know about what this exclusive documentary has in store for its viewers. “Melania” will be apathetic and unconvincing; it will be swathed in garish gold and putrid peach; and it will be filled with lecherous hangers-on, willing to bark like seals on camera and sacrifice their dignity to align themselves with a neo-fascist regime.

What’s far more important is what’s not being said in the movie, which appears when you read between the lines. Released in the shadow of Donald Trump’s plummeting approval ratings as ICE agents flood city streets, ready and willing to execute people in broad daylight when they’re not forcefully deporting harmless civilians, “Melania” is not exactly gunning for the box office’s top spot. The film, however, brushes these things under the rug, attempting to align Melania with her purported favorite cause: the health and safety of families everywhere.

In that respect, the documentary couldn’t have been released at a worse time. But, then again, there is no “good” time for a film like “Melania” to be released. As Donald Trump continues to terrorize the American people, tear apart families and push the nation toward a mask-off white supremacist state, what might be considered a tone-deaf move for past first ladies now functions like plain propaganda. All the more telling: Amazon MGM barred press from screening the film early, an entirely non-standard industry practice typically reserved for disastrous flops that need to fly under the radar entirely until they can be written off for tax purposes. While this documentary certainly falls under that category, the intentions behind its atypical release are even more nefarious, alluding so negligently to multi-level corruption that not even its sparse theatrical audience shared a single collective laugh at its subject’s expense.

Directed by the notorious and disgraced sex pest Brett Ratner — more notable for his appearance in the Epstein files than any of his prior work in shoddy films and unmemorable music videos — “Melania” is a last-ditch shot at image rehabilitation for all involved. Although it never had a shot at pulling that off successfully, it’s even more impossible for the film to clean up the perceptions of its director and star when the first shot of Melania is a snakeskin Louboutin heel, and one of the first needle drops is a Michael Jackson song. If the idea was to de-ice Melania for viewers and, in turn, make them forget about the allegations against Ratner, this one-two punch in the film’s first 10 minutes only portends glorious failure.

Or at least the failure would be glorious, if it weren’t so revolting at the same time. When I showed up to the AMC theater in midtown Manhattan Friday morning for the location’s earliest — and, hopefully, empty — screening, I tried my best to convey that I was there on a journalistic pursuit. The public deserves to know what the propaganda machine is churning out, and since the studio refused to screen the film for critics ahead of time, this was the only option to serve the reader.

But what’s particularly grating is that this is not just a strategy to avoid bad reviews for as long as possible. Barring journalists from “Melania” is a (barely) covert way to boost the film’s opening weekend numbers, which the administration and Amazon MGM surely intend to twist into some level of success, no matter how paltry the returns are during its theatrical run. Knowing the Trumpian playbook, this is also a childish revenge tactic to get back at the “liberal media,” who are forced to pay money for the film if they want to cover it with a modicum of accuracy and integrity.

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.Sign up here

No matter how the administration eventually spins it, what you need to know is that, by my eye, not one person in my theater was there because they were genuinely anticipating the film. My AMC sold 17 tickets for the first screening of the day, for a theater that seats 64 people. Shaping up the crowd during the endless trailers, I spotted 10 other people with notebooks — no doubt fellow journalists and critics, ready to do their jobs.

Others seemed to be there out of some morbid curiosity, to have a story to tell, or because they thought this might be an interesting way to use up one of the AMC A-List program’s four free tickets per week. No matter our reasoning, we became a community as soon as “Melania” actually started. I assumed the film would garner a few laughs here and there at the absurdity of it all, but we were stone-faced throughout. No chuckles, no snickers, not even a cough. The only things out of the ordinary were the sound of notebook pages turning and the two small clouds of odorless vape smoke rippling up into the darkness from a man seated a few rows in front of me. For the first time in my life, the staunch theater etiquette advocate in me could not care less.

What made me laugh was one of the 1,000 pre-movie bumpers, this one advertising AMC’s laser projection. “Each frame evokes a feeling,” the bumper said. And in the case of “Melania,” that feeling would be nausea.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) A view of a defaced bus stop advertisement for the new documentary film about First Lady Melania Trump

Throughout the film, Melania narrates her journey “from private citizen to first lady,” a line she repeats so frequently that I wondered if the vocal track she plugs in every morning was skipping like an old, scratched-up CD. The narration comprises about half of the movie, with Melania’s voice — which often drowns out people speaking diegetically —  chiming in to offer the viewer grade-school-level facts about the Blair House or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We get no sense of how Melania feels about any of the places she speaks about or the policies she hopes to enact. She’s the most animated during the fittings for her inauguration outfits, and even then, she talks with a hard, glacial cadence.

But let’s give the film the benefit of the doubt and assume for a moment that Melania Trump actually cares deeply about anything or anyone besides herself. Surely, there has got to be some speck of humanity here, some microcosmic pocket of life detectable amid her robotic demeanor and Ratner’s styleless direction. During a virtual meeting with her French equivalent, Brigitte Macron, Melania discusses her flagging Be Best initiative, a program intended to broadly address childhood and teenage problems from screen addiction to opioid abuse. Melania inquires about what Macron has done to curb bullying and anxiety among French youth. “No phones in school until they’re 11,” Macron replies. On a notebook with “BE BEST” letterhead, Melania scrawls, “No phones.” Problem solved.

Far more galling is the dissonance between Melania’s supposed advocacy for children and the real-life effects of her husband’s policies and political agendas. As Melania lights a candle for her late mother at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, it’s impossible not to remember all of the people forced to mourn their loved ones who have died in ICE custody, or who have been violently gunned down by this makeshift militia. In what would otherwise be the film’s most human sequence, Melania has the nerve to say, “The only thing we can do is cherish the moments with our families and loved ones while they’re still with us.”

(Amazon MGM Studios/Regine Mahaux) “Melania”

This statement, spoken through mechanical narration that makes it all the more barbaric, made my heart sink and my teeth grit. Melania Trump executive-produced her own documentary and reportedly earned a $28 million fee from Amazon’s $40 million bid for the distribution rights. She has approval over the content and ostensibly a sound enough mind to understand exactly the political and social contexts the film will be released into.

The problem is not that she cares so much about families that she can’t juggle everything, but that she doesn’t care at all. Knowing that your mother is dead is a privilege compared to all of the people who have had their lives turned upside down after their families were torn apart by ICE, shipped off to detainment camps around the country, often with no way to communicate directly with one another. It can’t be “unimaginable” to lose everything — as Melania says, witnessing the devastation of last year’s Los Angeles wildfires — if watching people lose everything is your day-to-day life.

That’s the glaring inconsistency between “Melania” the documentary and Melania Trump the person. Politicians are infamous for saying one thing and meaning another, but Melania and her MAGA compatriots don’t even bother to sell their lies anymore. They believe that, if they say something is true, the world will believe it; if they manage to look like a walking, talking human during their soulless vanity project documentaries, viewers will fall over themselves to give them another pass; if they include a title card with Melania’s “achievements” at the end of the film, those trivial wins will negate the horrors she, her husband and their accomplices have wrought onto the American public.

But none of that is true. This documentary doesn’t absolve any sins; it highlights them. “Melania” taunts the viewer and takes glee in the assumption that they can’t do anything about it. And though rallying takes work, and strengthening a community against a common enemy takes time, these tasks are not impossible. They start small and transform into a groundswell. So, if you’re looking to do your part, don’t pay to see this movie. Don’t watch it on Amazon Prime after it leaves theaters, and go one step further by canceling your Prime subscription altogether in protest. Pirate it. Leak it. Spread it. Make fun of it while remembering that its subject is not a caricature, but someone with extreme power. And so are you.