Most of “Melania” is this (Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios)
A black screen, a void, then the calming sounds of ocean waves. Keith Richards’s guitar punctures the roiling relaxation, as sea-green ocean waves brighten the screen. Merry Clayton woos over the opening riff of The Rolling Stones’ Vietnam-era anthem, “Gimme Shelter,” as a drone shot flits over a sandy beach and a pool deck with strangely familiar yellow umbrellas. Looming behind this Floridian resort daydream is the recognizable palatial architecture of Mar-a-Lago.
Ooh, a storm is threatening my very life today…
Flitting over the Winter White House, I drifted from the present (laying on my sofa) and into my own montage of free and foreboding associations: Ghislaine Maxwell trafficking Virginia Giuffre; Jeffrey Epstein’s nearby Palm Beach massage mansion; top-secret documents squirreled away next to a toilet; endless galas featuring Vanilla Ice, dog masks, and Trumpettes; the President crashing weddings like a lonesome Norma Desmond; DJ Don inflicting the same damn twenty-song playlist on guests; the war in Iran strategized in a poorly secured makeshift Situation Room, only blocked from paying members by a thin blue velvet curtain; Jeffrey Epstein’s blurry photos taken from backstage at a Rolling Stones show; Mick Jagger wedged between Ghislaine and Bill Clinton at a dinner; a photo of Rush Hour director Brett Ratner posing with a shirtless Jean-Luc Brunel and another with Epstein and two redacted girls…
If I don’t get some shelter, ooooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away…
A snakeskin red-bottomed stiletto pierced my Mar-a-Lago memory reel, stepping out of a heavy wrought iron door, onto a set of mosaic-lined stairs. These Louboutins belong to Melania Trump, whose recognizable honey-blonde head we follow as she steps into a black-tinted windowed SUV, where she takes her giant sunglasses off with a sigh, glancing out the window, expressionless. Her security detail makes its weaving way off the property, a shot reminiscent of the opening of Brandon Cronenberg’s appropriately decadent Infinity Pool, through the Florida highways to an airport where her branded Trump plane waits. A quick shot of a Trumpinator bobblehead wobbling, and the plane takes off.
War! Children! It’s just a shot away!
In a Patreon episode with Ray Kump, Tim Dillon described watching Brett Ratner’s documentary Melania as an out-of-body experience. I know what he means. During those first Rolling Stones-scored five minutes, I felt my soul float out of my body, hovering somewhere near my ceiling fan. To peel myself down, I had to rewatch this scene approximately seventeen more times (then obsessively listen to “Gimme Shelter” over and over for days). Why was I so transfixed? Nothing happens. Melania just wanders about, as she proceeds to do for much of the rest of the 108-minute film. Yet, this opening scene contains a slew of weighty and likely inadvertent reverberations, from Ghislaine and Jeffrey prowling around the periphery of the luxury resort to the tactless celebration of extravagant wealth for an audience that reelected Trump to afford eggs without taking out a loan. Then, there’s the stunning needle drop selection, a song that invokes war, rape, and murder in a doc about the woman married into an administration that seems to be really into all three. “Gimme Shelter” is such a (likely accidentally) ingenious choice that I worried if I consulted on the film while blinkered out in some kind of psychotic fugue state. (Later scenes, like a swing around the stately National Building Museum set to the Filthy Dreams classic, intergalactic Italian disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder’s “Chase,” and a glamorous executive photoshoot backed by Boney M.’s “Sunny,” didn’t assuage my concerns or my sanity.) In many ways, these first five minutes of Melania explain why the film is such an astonishing viewing experience. Sure, Melania is a shockingly self-absorbed cinematic atrocity, but it’s also a perversely fascinating document—and maybe even an unintended masterpiece—that perfectly captures the end of the American empire, the exact precipice before the fall, and the hubris, greed, ignorance, and corruption that hastened it.
Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’ our very street today…
Even though I have long obsessed over the unique trash horror of Trump aesthetics, I didn’t plan on inflicting a review of Melania on you, dearest readers. Sure, I considered going to the movie out of morbid curiosity when it was in theaters, mostly to gape at exactly who would show up to a screening at Union Square Regal Cinemas. But even I, someone who curiously attended the Madison Square Garden MAGA rally, couldn’t bring myself to fork over $20 for a known sex pest’s movie purchased for $40 million by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Studios, a sale that surely had nothing to do with bribing the Trump admin, just like Hunter Biden’s painting sales taking a dip after Joe staggered from the White House is just a coincidence. Plus, Melania, a snapshot of the former and future First Lady’s twenty days leading up to the inauguration, looked eye-wateringly, skin-tearingly tedious. While gorgeous and pleasantly inscrutable with outbursts of delightfully grim moroseness, mostly during Christmas, let’s be honest, Melania is not exactly the most riveting figure. Other than some heartfelt holiday messages like “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff?” she mainly just exists. I doubted Brett Ratner’s blockbuster excess could even make Melania interesting for close to two hours. Really, the most amusing part of the doc seemed to be the behind-the-scenes regret from the film crew, many of whom, according to Rolling Stone, demanded that their names be removed from the credits, and grotesque details about Brett Ratner’s piggish on-set behavior, leaving “a trail of detritus — discarded orange peels, gum wrappers — wherever he went…” Yet, a free month of Prime and Tim Dillon’s enticing anti-endorsement got me to finally relent. Initially, I deeply regretted not going to the theater, but now, having seen the documentary, I’m so glad I didn’t. Even in the short time between the doc’s theatrical run and its appearance on streaming, Melania has aged even more astonishingly poorly. This is largely due to Trump and his neocon buddies’ buffoonish war of choice in Iran, ushering in the final days of the United States’ global dominance, which makes the film feel like watching a documentary on Eva Braun (or Eva’s actual home movies) during Operation Barbarossa.
Burns like a red-coal carpet, Mad bull, lost your way…
This isn’t to say Melania isn’t boring. It is. Excruciatingly so. I challenged myself to avoid checking how much time had elapsed, but when I finally peeked, I still had over an hour to go! HELP! Melania’s prep for her hubby’s inauguration consists of nitpicking the size of the collar on her wonderfully severe inaugural outfit; approving the MAGA red envelopes for giant invitations; picking out garish White House furniture; and chatting to a smattering of embarrassingly butt-kissy world leaders and their spouses about her Be Best initiative, which seems to have been abandoned somewhere between immigration goons shooting American citizens in the face and U.S. embassies being bombed all over the Middle East. The most riveting moment in Melania’s day is her clipped phone call with Don, in which she unsubtly attempts to get off the phone as quickly as possible (“Did you watch it?” “I did NOT!”). In fact, Melania is so unforthcoming that it’s almost a relief when Donald appears. At least he can enliven the monotone mood by acting clownish, like whining about the NFL championships competing with the inauguration for airtime, taking a drowsy nap at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, and tiptoeing into the White House kitchen for Diet Cokes.
Melania is so dull that Ratner occasionally has to break into his own documentary to pull something, anything, out of her. In the back of one of many SUV rides, Brett attempts some light small talk, asking her favorite musician (Michael Jackson) and song (“Billie Jean”). In response, while resurrecting the classic MJ tune for a second time, Ratner goads her into shyly dancing, or really, shimmying her shoulders back and forth, proving that she can be a good sport around predators. Other than awkward car dancing, the action in Melania is so inert and monotonous that Ratner heavily relies on Melania’s deadpan voiceover, hoping that insight clearly penned by an LLM will jazz up her reserved exterior. Yet, the voiceover mostly consists of laughable lines from a dashed-off ChatGPT cover letter, such as my favorite: “Every day I live with purpose and devotion, orchestrating the complexities of my life while nurturing my family’s needs.”
I, too, orchestrate the complexities of my life, Mel!
This is the most emotion Melania can muster (Amazon MGM Studios)
Melania does take a crack at presenting a few mournful moments, a whiplash-inducing tone shift from the documentary’s otherwise puddle-deep world. Speaking frequently about her mother’s death, particularly when the anniversary coincides with Jimmy Carter’s funeral, she visits St. Patrick’s Cathedral and lights a candle for her mama. Praying for her mother is a strangely private act for a vanity project, made even more so by Melania’s unwavering emotional detachment. Not even Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” can force more gravity into the scene. Melania also encounters others’ grief when she meets with a freed hostage from the October 7 attacks whose husband, at that time, remained captured. While the woman breaks down, Melania comforts her, still with the same stoic expression. When the First Lady is whisked away into an elevator, insisting that she will remember this day forever, we have to believe her, even though nothing on her countenance says she’ll remember it by the time she gets to the parking garage! I got the sense that Melania would rather stare blankly out a car window than interact with, well, anyone. Relatable! I don’t even mind that Melania gives us nothing. I don’t WANT to know more about Melania! There is a potential documentary about the First Lady that could be more compelling, covering her early years as a teenage model in Paris and Milan and emigrating to the United States thanks to Paolo Zampolli, who is not only referred to in the Epstein files by a redacted sender as a “killer,” but, more recently, sicced ICE on his ex during a bitter custody dispute. But I don’t think we’ll ever get that story.
War! Children! It’s just a shot away!
Melania’s modeling days are only raised when her sycophantic designer buddy Hervé Pierre points out how her precise sartorial demands derive from her prior profession. Rather than being impressed by Melania’s fashion know-how, what stands out in this dressing scene is the abject terror glinting in the eyes of the two Asian tailors in response to her demand to remove the high-neckline on her blouse. One whispers to Hervé that it may not be possible with the shaky reticence of someone who may end up in a mass grave if they don’t get the shirt just right. These tailors are not unique in their trepidation; many of Melania’s interactions with staff feel like a queen ordering around her peasant servants, forced to cater to her every whim.
This reality TV feudalism is further emphasized by Melania’s surroundings. Barring all the non-action action, Melania is a parade of increasingly ludicrous rooms, mostly within Trump Tower’s penthouse, an ominous Overlook hotel-like maze of blinding gold, garish pink marble, and a phony Renoir in a suitably gaudy frame. Trump’s Vegas Versailles is so dually stuffy and extravagant that it looks as if it belongs behind velvet ropes in a museum. So much so that when one of the underlings grabbed hold of a gold leaf-flecked chair, I jumped! You mean you can touch this end-of-America period room?! Between the decorative opulence, the lavish party-planning monotony, and the shock music choices, Melania reminded me of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, which similarly depicts the gnawing boredom and empty excess in the last days of power. Even though Melania whines about the brim of her Spy vs. Spy hat rather than a towering camp wig, her idea for the pre-inaugural dinner’s perfectly farcical first course comes straight out of Marie A.’s banquets that paved her way to the big chop: caviar served out of a golden egg. Yes, really.
I like that the press photos also give us nothing (Amazon MGM Studios)
Though I suspect Ratner sees caviar stuffed in a golden shell as aspirational, the extremity of the opulence on display portrays the master grifter family as they pick the last chunks of meat off the bones of the decaying corpse of the American enterprise. This is made even tackier as Amazon MGM Studios, owned by another billionaire bone-picker, foisted the documentary on a downwardly mobile theatrical audience at a time when most are struggling to afford skyrocketing electric bills due to nearby data centers that fuel the hallucinating AI chatbots currently training to take all jobs. And that was even before the Iran war kick-started a global energy crisis and quite possibly a worldwide depression! With the Iran war, Melania finally found its purpose, historically preserving the blind ambition and misplaced hope before Trump betrayed the MAGA minions who unfortunately took him and his acolytes at their word when they repeated, “No more foreign wars!” This can be seen most clearly in the final third of the film, an agonizing rehash of the inauguration’s pomp and circumstance, from the swearing-in ceremony to Trump’s stiff dance at the inaugural ball. Yes, every nerve ending in my body itched to turn the film off rather than withstand the indoor parade/MAGA rally for a second torturous time. Yet, Ratner’s desperate effort to reflect the short-lived high and proud-to-be-an-American exhilaration that ushered in Trump’s second go is a transfixing rewatch now in the context of his soured administration, which has become so reckless and wretched that Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have emerged as opposition leaders. In his inaugural address, Trump boasts about his future role as a “peacemaker” and promises the “golden age of America.” He also joins VP JD and Melania to lay a wreath at the graves of the three soldiers killed during Biden’s pull-out of Afghanistan, a ceremony mostly intended to stick it to Biden on the way out but now emerges as tragically, bleakly ironic as Trump’s warmongering catastrophe has now killed the exact number of servicemembers as the Afghanistan withdrawal. This scene is so remarkable that I’m shocked they didn’t remove it from the digital release.
Rape, murder! It’s just a shot away!
Not only does Melania expose the administration’s broken promises in stark relief, but the doc also offers fleeting glimpses at the people who would usher in the destruction of the United States’ global standing, such as bad faith negotiator and casino magnate Steve Witkoff, Epstein’s Little Saint James lunch partner and tariff wacko Howard Lutnick, and federal workforce ruiner Elon Musk, whose hair sticks straight up like he just reemerged from a k-hole and wandered into the party. The most significant cameo comes courtesy of peroxide and frosted-lipped sleep paralysis demon Miriam Adelson, who chatters away at Jeff Bezos and Laura Sanchez at the pre-inaugural dinner. Maybe she’s bragging to the fellow billionaire about how she landed a real steal by purchasing the United States’ foreign policy as a present for Israel for only $100 million. Of course, it’s no surprise that this lineup of preening goons would crop up in the documentary. Yet, when viewed in retrospect, Melania takes on more (unintentional) meaning than just watching the past and future First Lady dither around with dress fittings. The doc eerily captures the disaster on the horizon while being too late to stop it. Melania shows that the seeds of the absurd end of the American empire were already planted as soon as the regime’s favorite oligarchs plunged their spoons into the fish egg goo glopped into Melania’s golden eggs.
It’s just a kiss away! It’s just a kiss away! Kiss away! Kiss away!