Amazon’s painful Melania documentary is an unintentionally perfect portrait of American cruelty

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Much of new film Melania follows the first lady consulting with her wardrobe stylists, her interior designers, her communications directors and various other professionals.Amazon MGM Studios/Amazon Prime

Melania

Directed by Brett Ratner

Featuring Melania Trump

Classification G; 104 minutes

Now playing in theatres

Opening with the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter and going on to unleash such undeniably evocative needle drops as Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Then He Kissed Me by the Crystals (the latter arriving in a moment that deliberately echoes the famous Copacabana shot in Goodfellas), Brett Ratner’s new pseudo-documentary Melania proves that the filmmaker is no dummy.

Yet everything surrounding his film’s expansive and expensive soundtrack also cements Ratner – and everyone else associated with this project, up to and including its distributor, Amazon MGM Studios – as particularly abhorrent enablers of a vanity project gone mad.

What you need to know about Amazon’s Melania Trump documentary

Designed as a fly-on-the-wall portrait of the days leading up to the 2025 presidential inauguration from the vantage point of Donald Trump’s wife, Ratner’s film commits too many cinematic sins to count. (Not that Trump is exactly in the habit of accepting any official tallies.)

There is the film’s thoroughly fawning and toady vibe, with the director frequently piping in off-camera to compliment his subjects or wish the U.S. President “sweet dreams.” There is the noxious visual style, which jumps between too-slick drone footage and faux-artsy Super 8 shots, the latter of which cannot help but force audiences to wonder whether the movie is about to slip into full-on, ghastly Zapruder mode.

And then there is Ratner’s complete disassociation with reality, with the filmmaker presenting the Trumps as a universally adored family that the United States is lucky and blessed to have safeguarding all that is good in the world today (“good” in this case meaning everything that is basically “white and gold,” to cite Melania’s favourite colours and dinner-party aesthetic).

But setting aside all of the above, the very worst part of Ratner’s flimsy piece of propaganda is that it is thoroughly, terminally boring. Even the most agitated progressive will walk into Melania and, looking for a fight, exit merely groggy and exhausted, if not induced into a full-on slumber.

So much of the film is simply a collection of distended scenes of the first lady consulting with her wardrobe stylists, her interior designers, her communications directors and various other professionals who should know better than to associate themselves with this classless, ignorant person who, as Ratner unintentionally reveals, possesses no compelling or redeeming qualities.

The action takes a further dip in energy once inauguration day rolls around, which Ratner chronicles with the zeal and integrity of a boy reporter who has been given his first assignment for the junior high newspaper. If you recall the various television news segments from then, you already know just how alternately depressing and dull the proceedings were, and yet the film somehow makes the entire affair feel even longer and more painful than a root canal conducted at 20,000 feet in the air.

Melania Trump is capping her first year back as first lady with the global release of a documentary she produced about the 20 days leading up to husband Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

The Associated Press

Eventually, the film seems to acknowledge its own inherent deficits, with the camera simply lingering on the crowd instead of concentrating on its subject, the three cinematographers credited perhaps hoping audiences will instead enjoy a game of Spot the Bootlicker. (Hey, there’s Amazon’s own Jeff Bezos yucking it up! And is that Elon Musk I spy out of the corner of my eye?)

“Every day, I lead with purpose and devotion,” Melania says early in the film, the first lady’s utterly dispassionate voice deployed by Ratner to narrate the film into a kind of languorous oblivion. But her only purpose seems to be throwing the tackiest, most garishly conceived parties imaginable, and her only devotion seems to be to ignoring the monstrous actions of her husband and those in his (or rather, their) inner circle.

In attempting to make a grand and heroic portrait of the first lady and the political moment surrounding her, Ratner has accidentally delivered the ultimate chronicle of 21st-century excess and greed, a world of casual yet immense cruelty covered in flop sweat and gold glitter.

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When Melania takes a moment toward the film’s finale to highlight the fact that she is an immigrant, and that “we all share the same humanity,” it will take everything in your power not to retch right there in the theatre.

Of course, North America being a land of democracies – for now – everyone has the right to judge Melania (the film, and the person) for themselves. The eight other moviegoers in my early Friday afternoon screening in downtown Toronto certainly had their own motivations for coming out, despite the multiplex’s other auditoriums playing movies whose titles I could only view as warnings: Mercy and Send Help.

But if you value your time, if you value your sanity, if you value the concept of cinema, and if you value the cost of dry cleaning your clothing after inevitably upchucking all over it during the end credits, then you should stay home, cancel your Prime Video account in protest, and send hopes and prayers that 2028 arrives sooner than later.