This week on 10-Foot Pole Theatre is Melania (now on Amazon Prime Video), a film that its subject, Melania Trump, insists isn’t a documentary, but “a created experience” and “purposeful storytelling.” Translation to regular human English: It’s a celeb propagandist ego stroke featuring its subject as a producer that’s different from other celeb propagandist ego strokes featuring its subject as a producer – e.g., recent docs about Pamela Anderson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, etc. – by maintaining Melania’s mystique instead of breaking it down. The goal of these projects is, typically, to humanize their wildly famous subjects, but Melania, in following the First Lady as she prepares for the Jan., 2025 inauguration of her He Who Shall Not Be Named President husband (that’s a joke – it’s Donald Trump!), just doubles down on her inscrutable and robotic public persona. It’s also directed by Brett Ratner, the Rush Hour and X-Men: The Last Stand filmmaker who was bumrushed out of Hollywood by the #MeToo movement (he’s been accused of sleazy behavior, but never officially charged), now enjoying his first job in roughly a decade. Is anybody surprised that the film tanked at the box office after Amazon ponied up $40 million (plus marketing expenses) to release it? Or that it’s a monumental bore?
The Gist: After the dreamy drone shots of Mar-a-Lago, the Rolling Stones needle drop (“Gimme Shelter”), the dramatic low-angle shot of Melania’s spike pumps (there are enough of these in the film to make Quentin Tarantino spontaneously combust), the motorcade trip to a waiting airplane, the landing in New York City, the Michael Jackson needle drop (“Billie Jean” – Melania’s favorite song, as we’ll learn later) and a stroll to an elevator, I noticed a hair out of place on Melania’s head. I’m sure that resulted in the film editor being escorted to the door by security. But! Ratner and Melania – whose fingerprints would be all over this film if she actually touched things that haven’t been pre-scrubbed by one of her army of handlers, and likely was therefore content to just hover and stare while editors and producers toiled away – ultimately leave the shot with the stray follicle in. Why? That’s how she shows that she’s just one of us reg’lar folk. I dunno about you, but I have hairs out of place all the time. And if she’s embarrassed about it, well, we know how she feels, don’t we? DON’T WE?
I’m sorry. I’m writing under the assumption that everybody knows who Melania is. Well, here’s what Melania tells us about her: She was born in Slovenia, she has a mother (who died in 2024) and a father, she used to be a model and… uh. Hm. Guess we’ll have to check Wikipedia for further background. Oh, she reveals that she has “vision” that she applies to the visual representation of herself, from her wardrobe to the invitations to the inauguration and the interior design of the White House, but she seems unwilling to elaborate upon what that “vision” entails – we just see her dictate that a strip of fabric on a gown be shortened, and a necker-thingy for a different outfit be cut so it’s less like a turtleneck, which apparently has something to do with her quest for what she calls “timeless elegance.” As she narrates, she has an eye for detail like her fashion designer mother, who died a year prior to this. Melania’s still mourning, a human emotion/experience that results in the same stoic facial expression we see throughout the film. The year anniversary of her passing falls on the same day as President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, which we watch Melania attend before she flies back to New York to light a candle in a cathedral to memorialize her mother.
Only a few days remain until the inauguration. As Melania prepares, we meet her father, Viktor Knavs, who gives the only talking-head style interview in the doc. She video conferences with First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron. She almost changes her expression while watching news of destructive California wildfires, and tells us how upset she was about it via narration. She meets with a woman who was held hostage by Hezbollah. She sings along to “Billie Jean” in the car (only the choruses), oblivious to the subtext lurking in her declaration that Michael Jackson is her favorite musician. She meets with Queen Rania of Jordan. She and DT sit down with Secret Service members to discuss inauguration protocol, and Ol’ Trumpkins suggests the college football championship was scheduled the same evening “on purpose.”
Melania gets in and out of cars, gets in and out of planes, walks down staircases, walks down hallways. Meanwhile, we get a dramatic character arc: The hat she wears to the inauguration is scrutinized, tried on, tweaked, gets its band manipulated, placed in a box, lugged around by assistants and finally placed atop her head at the perfect angle to leave her eyes in shadow all day, and to assure she/it gets memed to death. It goes on quite a journey, that hat.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, Michelle Obama’s doc Becoming hit Netflix a few years ago, but I risk being both-sides’d to death for pointing that out.
Performance Worth Watching: Melania’s Hat deserves employee of the month honors, just like Inanimate Carbon Rod.
Sex And Skin: Lord thank you, none.
Our Take: Watching Melania is sort of like petting a hairless cat – weird and not quite right, with the lingering feeling that it was very expensive and the product of creative inbreeding. (And I draw this metaphor knowing full well it doesn’t function in the context of large swaths of potential viewers who are wildly allergic to all things Trump.) Ratner and Melania piece together this lushly photographed, emotionally sterile “created experience” with a general cluelessness regarding how it would likely be received. Sure, they certainly realized it would be scrutinized and picked apart – POLITICS, right? – yet it still plays out like a product of terminal myopia in its gross lack of human relatability, and its lingering obsession with the celeb/reality-TV world that hatched the Trump brand. At least other celeb “documentaries,” controlled and judiciously edited as they might be, feature moments of vulnerability or openness that underscore how we and their immensely privileged subjects all belong to the same species.
Beyond a few broadstroked nothingisms about “honoring the White House and its very special place in our nation’s history” (this, months prior to the East Wing being bulldozed for a ballroom), having “so much joy and anticipation for the future” (if there’s one thing we never ever register from Melania, it’s a sense of joy) and gravely intoning during a visit to Arlington on how “freedom is not free” – although the film has no credited writer, it all feels like some hack wrote generic copy for her and she co-opted authorship – we never get the slightest hint of what Melania thinks or feels about being the First Lady or Donald Trump’s wife, or even about all the pomp and circumstance of the inauguration. They’re all merely opportunities for her to paint a veneer of bland quasi-elegance on top of everything and maintain her statuesque presence in the spotlight. You might think she’d elaborate on how her fashion background and upbringing would inform her sense of style, but we get nothing. No insight, no musings, and nary a word or expression that isn’t rigorously vetted and airbrushed like a full-page perfume ad in a copy of Vogue from 1997.
So a lot of effort seemingly went into making Melania as uninteresting as possible. The film has all the distinction and personality of a corporate OSHA training video, coalescing with the big inauguration events, from the swearing-in to luncheons and ceremonies and speeches, and its only candid moment occurs at the expense of the political opposition, as cameras capture Joe Biden and Kamala Harris standing around frowning, arms crossed, as they await the ceremonial changing of the guard (this might be the only overtly political moment of a film, ruling out whatever we might rummage from unintended subtext). That final stretch of spangly inauguration whatnot features enough scenes of walking to rival The Lord of the Rings, as it tracks Melania and her hubs through hallways and ballrooms and more hallways and parties and even more hallways, with one scene in a Capital One Arena freight elevator with battered, scratched-up walls, the rare instance in which Melania isn’t in front of a meticulously groomed and airbrushed backdrop.
We get a moment when Melania adds the word “unifier” to DT’s inauguration speech – specifically, in a line in which he declares himself a peacemaker (months before he half-assedly coauthored a war with Iran) – and he “jokes” that any input from his wife should be cut out of the movie. There’s also a moment when he turns to the camera and calls her “a difficult woman,” with her in earshot. Sweetheart of a guy! We get glimpses of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and indirect financier of Melania Jeff Bezos in a few scenes, and a curious needle drop of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” The film concludes with her promise that she’ll fulfill her duties as First Lady “with purpose and style,” and a couple walls of text trumpeting her accomplishments from the past year. You’ll be lucky if you maintain consciousness long enough to read it.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
