There is one (and maybe only one) extraordinary moment in Brett Ratner’s somniferous documentary on the current first lady of the United States. Towards the close, as Donald and Melania Trump, in the last hours of inauguration day, lope across a heavily decorated section of Washington, DC, the soundtrack – already much at home to your dad’s first iPod – happens upon The Crystals’ immortal Then He Kissed Me. You know? The song most famous for playing while Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, as a New York gangster and his wife, stride confidently into the Copacabana Club in Goodfellas. Is this a gag? Almost certainly not. Never have I encountered a film so lacking in irony and self-awareness. One can only assume Ratner, he of the Rush Hour action flicks, was so bored by his own movie that his attention wandered fatally.
Not that many people will notice. There is an ancient cartoon – maybe from as long ago as the 1970s – that depicts a group of gaunt, shaggy people sitting in a circle surrounded by bongs and syringes. “You mean we’re all investigative journalists doing a piece on the drug epidemic?” one says.
This came to me while looking around the 14 or so people (more than you might guess) gathered for an early evening screening of Melania in a Dublin city-centre cinema. Were they all journalists reviewing a film that arrived in 3,000 cinemas across the world without, for understandable reasons, a preceding press show? Not such a mad idea. The Guardian reported that one rescheduled screening in Islington – a media-friendly quarter of north London – actually sold out because it was full of “notepad wielding journalists”.
The picture’s financing has already attracted much puzzled reporting. Amazon MGM is said to have paid $40 million (€33.7 million) for the rights to a film that, even with journos forced to fork out real money, was never likely to challenge Avatar: Fire and Ash at the box office. Add on another $35 million (€29.5 million) or so on marketing and you have got some white elephant on your hands.
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If one was being polite one might explain the film was made with the full co-operation of producer Mrs M Trump (who allegedly trousered a fair whack of Amazon’s 40 big ones). If one was being less compliant one would describe Ratner’s project as shameless propaganda. But not active, forceful propaganda in the school of Leni Riefenstahl’s films about the Nazis. Melania: The Movie appears keener on inducing narcolepsy in its viewers than energising them into massed marching. Triumph of the Dull, perhaps.
The picture, beginning in early 2025, walks us through a stupefying array of Melania’s engagements as she prepares for her husband’s inauguration. To be fair, in the opening conversations about fashion, she seems to know what she is talking about and earns apparently deserved respect from circling designers and stylists. The MelaniaBot is then placed on to her casters and wheeled around the great and the good while spouting a numbing stream of mechanical inanities. She and Brigitte Macron, wife of the French president, say various things about the world’s foster children. She meets a recently released Israeli hostage and gives her an icy hug. At President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, Melania’s monotonous voice-over dwells mainly on the death of her own mother.
Worthwhile insights into her relationship with the Donald are rare. Aware of the camera throughout – this doesn’t really count as fly-on-the-wall – he speaks to her (and us) much as he speaks to the assembled press corps. The first time we hear him he is boasting to the missus about how hugely he won the 2024 election. All the swing states. The popular vote. “Bigger than anticipated!”
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No good impression emerges of the former Slovenian model. No bad impression emerges either. Ratner’s film achieves, rather, a sort of passive distance – as you might get by pointing a camera, for close to two hours, at a waterfall or a wheat field. The effect is not altogether unpleasing. Scored sweetly by Tony Neiman, the supposed documentary could – if it weren’t about what it’s actually about – play as an unlikely meditation aid. Mutter your mantra as Melania discusses Chef Chris’s “golden egg and caviar”.
Every now and then, however, you are shaken out of your complacency and reminded of what this regime stands for. Rehearsing his inauguration speech, Trump experiments with the word “peacemaker”. Melania suggests adding another. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he eventually says. Arriving amid the violent chaos in Minnesota, that sequence shuts down any chance of Melania playing as a camp diversion.
It ends with two or three screens listing Mrs Trump’s supposedly unparalleled achievements as first lady. One leaves imagining a paraphrase of famous dialogue repeated by the brainwashed soldiers in John Frankenheimer’s conspiracy thriller The Manchurian Candidate.
“Melania Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. Melania Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. Melania Trump is .…”
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