Can anybody be entirely impartial when reviewing Melania?
Perhaps not. The Amazon MGM documentary about the first lady directed by scandal-plagued filmmaker Brett Ratner with a whopping $75 million price tag (or “bribe,” as Jimmy Kimmel called it) provokes all sorts of feelings — regardless of one’s political leanings — before you even enter the theater.
But reviews are rolling in just the same, and below are samples of some of the (almost entirely scathing) critiques. Melania is billed as an inside look at Donald Trump‘s partner as she prepared to return to the White House during the 20 days before the 2025 inauguration. The film is rolling out into more than 1,500 theaters across the U.S. this weekend, and its box office returns are being closely watched as a political barometer of sorts.
The reviews below are coming out just as the film is hitting the screens. Mainstream press were reportedly blocked from attending the film’s premiere at the Kennedy Center on Thursday. While screenshots of theaters with unsold seats have been circulating on social media, tracking service NRG has predicted a launch in the $5 million range — which would be enormously successful for a documentary. Exhibitors are less certain, however.
Here are some of the early critiques:
The Hollywood Reporter: “This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it … The expensive propaganda doc is glossily shot and lushly scored, although for some reason Ratner keeps inserting segments shot on what looks like Super 8 film, as if to infuse the Trumps with some of that Kennedy-era aura. Before the film ends with onscreen graphics listing Melania’s achievements as First Lady in such laudatory fashion that North Korea would blush, she’s shown posing for her official portrait. Doing her best to look both sexy and authoritative, she seems most in her element.”
The Atlantic called the film “a disgrace.” “Ratner seems desperate to find action, but there is none. The pace is stultifying… Mostly, Ratner captures his subject walking from liminal place to liminal place in five-inch heels, the camera trailing her like a lap dog … Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket. It’s a reminder that the richest people in the world are investing in entertainment brands not because they care about art but because the public does, and because all of these vanity projects and capitulations are a way to consolidate their own power and fortune.”
The Guardian: “Ratner’s film plays like a gilded trash remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in which a button-eyed Cinderella points at gold baubles and designer dresses, cunningly distracting us while her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and asset-strip the federal government …the fun’s not infectious and the guests are a nightmare, and two hours of Melania feels like pure, endless hell.”
Variety: “It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called Day of the Living Tradwife … Its very existence is a pure expression of that control. By the time Melania arrives at the Inaugural festivities, the film has given itself over to a series of rituals (the candlelight dinner, the Inaugural itself, the luncheon, the Starlight Ball), which feels weirdly fitting since the filmmaking itself is so ritualized. It never lets the air of experience in.”
The London Evening Standard gave the film its only positive review so far (thus ensuring Melania will not have a zero percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes): “If you take this film for what it is, Melania’s own, curated take on herself, then there’s one thing she wants to get across, it’s that there’s human warmth there under the cheekbones and the slanting feline eyes. May I say right now she looks extraordinary for 55? … Is the film worth $40 million? I can’t see it myself, except for the shot of Kamala Harris at the inauguration, which is worth the entrance ticket … She’s a phenomenon. What, exactly, is her relationship with Trump, who was effusive about, ‘my beautiful wife’? We don’t know. The enigma remains.”
The Independent: “To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a ‘mother, wife, daughter, friend,’ yet is only depicted preening and scowling … Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness … It will exist as a striking artifact – like The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will – of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly.”
More to come.
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