Amazon’s new Melania Trump documentary promised it would reveal the real woman behind the first lady’s steely exterior, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. But after sitting through this 104-minute exercise in superficiality, I can report “there’s nothing to see.” Melania, which follows the first lady as she prepares for Donald Trump’s second inauguration, is filled with scenes of the inscrutable ex-model trying on hats, strutting down hallways “in stilettos that never come off,” and attending meetings “about place settings and invitations.” Director Brett Ratner—exiled from Hollywood after being accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women—never unearths what Melania actually thinks about her return to the White House, or anything else. It doesn’t matter. Hiding her true personality “is, in fact, her personality.” Despite its vapidity, Melania took in $7 million in its first weekend, “the strongest opening for a documentary in a decade,” said Sam Adams in Slate. That would be impressive, if Amazon hadn’t spent an unprecedented $40 million buying the documentary and another $35 million marketing it. There’s an old Hollywood term for “a $75 million movie that opens with $7 million in box office: a flop.”
Melania isn’t a documentary, said Alexandra Petri in The Atlantic, it’s “a horror movie.” This is the tale of a woman who experiences none of the things that make life worth living: “meaningful conversations, shared laughter, petting a dog, casual interactions with someone who is neither an employee nor a family member.” In their place are “Fittings! More fittings! Pomp! Private jets! Expensively attired billionaires being served—I am not making this up—golden eggs.” Melania is trapped in an invisible bubble she will never be able to escape, “and she hasn’t even noticed.” Please don’t mistake her for a victim, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. The “Slovenian Sphinx” is not, as some liberals have fantasized, “Rapunzel in the tower, pining to be saved from the ogre imprisoning her.” She is comfortable with her husband’s authoritarianism, and “comfortable in the frosty vertical solitude of the tower, swaddled in luxury.”
“There is no reason for Melania to exist outside of rank corruption,” said Sonny Bunch in The Bulwark. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent $40 million buying this hagiography—$28 million of which went to Melania—in the clear hope of protecting his companies from government interference. “It’s all quite disgusting.” But it’s also quite fascinating to see just how many Americans will trek to a theater to “bask in the golden glow of Trump Tower,” and how such a “pure and naked instrument of graft and propaganda can be deployed to great effect on an audience happy to lap it up.”
Not telling all