Reviews of Melania, the $107 million Amazon documentary about America’s First Lady, which dropped in cinemas around the world over the weekend, are scathing.
One of the most searing is The Guardian piece by Xan Brooks, which ran with the headline: “Melania review – Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest.”
(About Nazi Rudolf Hoss, The Zone of Interest is a film about the decadent life he and his wife, with their children, lived in their home located behind the Auschwitz concentration camp.)
Awarded just one star by Rotten Tomatoes, the much anticipated film has opened to a better-than-expected $8 million or more, according to Hollywood Reporter.
The documentary centres on the 20 days leading up to husband Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Brooks continues: “Dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing … No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it.”
“She glides from the fashion fitting to the table setting, and from the ‘candlelit dinner’ to the ‘starlight ball’, with a face like a fist and a voice of sheet metal.”
“To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it,” said Frank Scheck at the Hollywood Reporter.
“Fittingly, it was directed by Brett Ratner, whose feature film career was derailed in 2017 after numerous sexual assault allegations that he has denied. But like many unsavory people associated with Donald Trump, he’s apparently received a pardon,” he continues.
Vanity Fair’s Joy Press said the “interminable” doco is a “purportedly serious film that plays like a mockumentary,” she said. “If you were making a movie that parodied the current first lady of the United States, I’m not sure what you’d do differently.”
“This is a work of propaganda, but director Brett Ratner is no Leni Riefenstahl. Missing are the German filmmaker’s awe-inspiring visuals and hypnotic edits; instead, Ratner substitutes endless shots of the gaudy, excessive Trump aesthetic as Melania floats through Trump Tower, private jets, motorcades, and gala dinners until she lands at the White House,” Press writes.
According to USA Today’s Brian Truitt, “Because she doesn’t address the camera, Melania suffers from a brutal disconnect. Trump speaks about son Barron, but he doesn’t speak about his mom. (Barron, by the way, is low-key the most compelling person in the entire movie because you’re dying to know what this teenager thinks about these events he’s going through.)”
Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times, describes the film as a “gilded infomercial”: “Many have fantasised that the first lady was Rapunzel in the tower, pining to be saved from the ogre. It turns out there is no mystery, no dark anguish.”
This masthead’s reviewer, Karl Quinn, said: “Revelations and insights into the first lady of the United States are as thin on the ground as the hairs are on her husband’s head.”
Proud husband and POTUS Trump saw the one-hour, 44-minute film for the first time at a private White House screening over the weekend; he said he thought it was “really great”.
“But it really brings back a glamour that you just don’t see any more,” Trump said. “Our country can use a little bit of that, right?”
Back to the Hollywood Reporter’s Scheck for an insight noted by several reviewers: the film’s curious soundtrack.
“The documentary … begins at Mar-a-Lago, where we first see Melania’s high heels, then the back of her head, before her face is finally revealed (it’s quite a tease). She boards a Trump-branded private jet to the strains of [Rolling Stones song] Gimme Shelter. Which seems a strange choice, since the lyrics refer to murder, rape and war. It’s but the first of several odd needle drops in the documentary, including Billie Jean (about false sexual allegations), Everybody Wants to Rule the World (self-explanatory), Ravel’s Bolero (forever associated with sex), and It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World (yup). You get the feeling whoever compiled the soundtrack has a wicked sense of humour.”
Apparently, that person was Melania herself. Marc Beckman, a senior adviser for the first lady and one of the movie’s producers, touted her hands-on involvement in several interviews before the film’s release, saying she oversaw the creative direction of the film, including production, film editing, managing the ad campaign, creating the trailer and selecting the music. Michael Jackson is one of her all-time favourite artists.
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