The reviews of Melania (Amazon MGM Studios), still playing at bat caves across the country, constituted a massacre. The blue meanies were out in force. “An abomination,” recoiled the Daily Beast. “A disgrace,” decreed The Atlantic. The Guardian clocked it as two hours of “pure, endless hell.” Collectively, Melania registered a loud splat on Rotten Tomatoes, with a measly aggregated score of 7 percent. (Even the woebegone Ella McCay got a charitable 23 percent.)
Documentaries seldom receive such drubbings, which are usually reserved for elaborate stinkers such as Battlefield Earth or Cats or Ryan Murphy’s Kim Kardashian–starring All’s Fair, but this is no ordinary documentary, scarcely a documentary at all—more like a glossy brochure unfolding in frictionless motion with First Lady Melania Trump’s ethereal voice-over narration piped in from outer space.
The movie is also not propaganda, or even slopaganda, as the new phrase goes. Propaganda seeks to persuade or frighten the audience into acquiescence, and slopaganda simply lays on swirls of A.I. glop. (Glopaganda?) Albeit a partisan affair targeted to the MAGA faithful (a diminishing flock tottering to the cliffs), Melania is more of a promotional package, a procedural devoted to the planning and construction of a ceremonial occasion down to the last fine maddening detail.
“A glossy brochure unfolding in frictionless motion with First Lady Melania Trump’s ethereal voice-over narration piped in from outer space.”
The proper comparison with Melania is not with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the home movies of Eva Braun, or the narcissistic photoplay of Madonna’s Truth or Dare, but more so with The September Issue (2009), the exclusive inside look at how then Vogue editor Anna Wintour and her elite crew of elves assembled the magazine’s historically massive September issue, all 840 pages of it. That First Lady Melania Trump has been denied the cover of Vogue is not a petty snub. It is a recognition of parallel kingdoms that must not cross, demarcation lines that must be preserved. The Melania movie seeks to circumvent that.
Politically disparate, Melania Trump and Anna Wintour wield the same strictly business aura of authority on-screen that makes everybody around them—i.e., underlings and associates—do their best to anticipate every question and not speak out of turn for fear of banishment. Timid deference follows Trump and Wintour wherever they go as their royal due. Heaven protect anyone trying to make idle chitchat in the elevator while Her Highness is lasered in on her private thoughts while staring straight ahead at the floor numbers. Sailors have been chucked overboard for less.
If you were to do a split screen of The September Issue and Melania, the similarities between Wintour mapping out a fashion spread for the magazine, shifting photographs around to achieve the right mix, and the First Lady going over the tableware and place settings for a pre-inaugural dinner (caviar served inside a golden egg) would be striking, if not particularly interesting. It’s not as if they’re performing brain surgery, after all, or landing a plane on a flight deck.
What saved The September Issue from being a total advertorial and cult artifact were the welcome rumblings of His late Majesty André Leon Talley, a figure too larger-than-life to fit into any editorial cubbyhole, too spontaneous to stick to mouthing banalities. The most arresting moments in The September Issue reveal Talley on the court in a tennis outfit that defies credulity, and his lament for the dreary looks that have been trooping down the runway. “It’s been Bleak Week over here in America. It’s a famine of beauty, honey. My eyes are starving for beauty.”
Starving eyes will find little to feed them in Melania once the 2025 inauguration nears and the film tunnels through the itinerary of the formal handoff of power with all of its attendant fiddle-faddle. The only rogue element—“rogue elephant” also applies—is whenever her husband, our current president and bane of existence, lumbers in to fill up the camera frame and say something twinkly.
Donald Trump’s appearance on the big screen is a shock for those of us with delicate sensibilities and a modicum of proportion. Even though Trump was then on the eve of his second term, preparing to take the oath of office on the Bible and solve all of America’s problems with his bare hands, he already looks tired, puffy, cake-baked, half there. In inaugural gala after gala, Trump and Melania perform a pantomime of being a loyal, loving couple, but each time they clasp hands you can almost hear the squish of Gorilla Glue binding them together.
“Donald Trump’s appearance on the big screen is a shock for those of us with delicate sensibilities and a modicum of proportion.”
The late director Robert Altman, with his roving camera and nimble eye for apprehending eccentric behavior, might have been able to extract something from the black-tie revels in Melania, but Brett Ratner, the producer-director retrieved from the sun-dappled purgatory of Hollywood’s cancel culture, just pads behind his subject like a loyal retainer.
Despite its utter paucity of imagination and a creeping tedium that closes off mental passages, Melania’s coverage of the dinners and balls does illuminate something about the quadrennial pageantry that gives the lie to all of the platitudes about democracy, the will of the people, august tradition. As Melania herself acknowledges, these galas are all about and for the donors. And there they are, jollying it up. Tim Cook. Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Miriam Adelson. Joe Rogan’s bulbous head pops up, too. Their faces float like balloons as they revel in the spoils of victory and proximity to other rapacious moneybags. Sprinkled among them are various vessels of evil incarnate now serving in Trump’s Cabinet, and, of course, a bearded J. D. Vance, eyes gleaming with opportunism.
If there is scant consolation to be had, it is that the enterprise mission of Melania has failed both commercially at the box office—as measured against its stratospheric production and marketing budget of $75 million—and politically as a coronation keepsake. I saw Melania at a 90-percent-empty theater utilizing screen captioning, and as the film kicked off with the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” on the soundtrack, the lyrics “Rape, murder, yeah” appeared superimposed across an image of Melania seated in an S.U.V.
“Trump and Melania perform a pantomime of being a loyal, loving couple, but each time they clasp hands you can almost hear the squish of Gorilla Glue binding them together.”
It was a spooky choice of intro, and an unintentionally inspired one. “Gimme Shelter” is a song that has always conjured menace and maelstrom, and, as if fulfilling a dark prophecy, only hours before Melania held its invitation-only premiere at the newly renamed Trump-Kennedy Center, Alex Pretti was murdered in Minneapolis by agents of ICE. Pretti’s shooting and its roiling aftermath cast a pall over the Melania festivities that reportedly left Melania herself fuming, her special night ruined. Under normal circumstances (though what is normal anymore?), Melania might have prevailed over the razzing from critics, but it was no match for Minneapolis. History bats last.
Melania is in theaters now, and will stream on Amazon after that
James Wolcott is a Columnist at AIR MAIL. He is the author of several books, including the memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York