Melania, Brett Ratner’s documentary following the first lady of 2017–2020 around as she gets ready to become first lady again in January 2025, is in some ways The Passion of the Christ for this particular year of our Lord. That is, the media film critics have jumped on Melania to tear it apart with all the verbal viciousness they can summon, strictly on the basis of its subject matter.
Just as David Edelstein, writing for Slate in 2004, called Mel Gibson’s re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion “a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie” without making the slightest effort to evaluate how it stood up as a work of cinematic art, Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter lays on the sarcasm so thick in his review of Melania (“fly-on-the-gilded-wall fawn job”) that you need a machete to chop your way through his thicket of dismissiveness. Even the movie’s easy-on-the-ears soundtrack of classical music favorites and rock hits is used as fodder for Scheck’s relentless ad hominem drubbing, with the “hominem” being Melania’s despised husband, Donald. The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” is all about “murder, rape and war,” Scheck declares, while Ravel’s “Boléro” is all about “sex.” (Scheck is either quite the puritan or quite the pornography-obsessed.) Not to be outdone, Owen Gleiberman of Variety pronounces: “[Melania] barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial.”
This is absurd, because, in fact, Melania is highly entertaining and well worth its hour-and-forty-four-minute length. It is gorgeously photographed, as even its most caustic critics grudgingly admit. And the things that are photographed are themselves beautiful: the New York City skyscraper skyline in views from the Trump Tower penthouse that is still the family’s pied-à-terre; the familiar Washington, D.C., monuments in luminous soft focus; tiled and turreted Mar-a-Lago looking like the impeccably manicured 1920s architectural fantasy that it is. I loved the soundtrack: Who can resist Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me,” and James Brown’s yearning “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”? It’s not surprising that, to the consternation of the critics, the eye- and ear-pleasing Melania has proved to be an audience hit. On its opening weekend it grossed more than $7 million, an outstanding return for a documentary and nearly three times the entire gross take to date of the sour and lugubrious Blue Moon, salivated over by the critics and nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the upcoming Academy Awards. Some 70 percent of Melania‘s audience has been female, according to reports—not surprising because we females especially resonate with glossy, pretty things.
There is one point, however, on which the critics are absolutely right: Melania Trump, as she comes across in this movie—and in all other glimpses of her that we the public have had since her husband started running for president in 2015—is an “enigma,” in the words of Melanie McDonagh, who wrote a rare positive review of Melania for the Evening Standard. Melania is named as co-producer in the documentary’s credits, and it’s clear that she has exercised iron control over what we, the audience, are allowed to see. And we are allowed to see almost nothing.
Melania Trump is extraordinarily beautiful, tall (5’11”), and lustrous-haired, and at age fifty-five she has retained all of that beauty, although she’s now a goddess Juno instead of the coltish nymph of her modeling youth. She dresses flawlessly and with unerring style, the most glamorous first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy and even surpassing Jackie in looks and elegance. But her splendid appearance—the stiletto heels, the succession of meticulously tailored outfits—is a carapace. It’s armor. Even her face is veiled, by expertly applied makeup, by false eyelashes thick as paintbrushes, by the dark glasses she wears day and night. She utters only the most anodyne of public statements: “As first lady, children will always remain my priority.” Melania Trump is determined not to let anyone see her or know her inner life. She is a baptized Catholic, for example, but she has made her real religious beliefs as inscrutable as everything else. In New York she visits St. Patrick’s Cathedral—and that church has never looked more glorious than in this movie—to light a candle in memory of her mother, who died in 2024. But she doesn’t make the sign of the cross when the priest blesses her, nor does she pray. (This is the only part of the movie where the soundtrack is off-kilter; Aretha Franklin does a fine cover of “Amazing Grace,” but it doesn’t sound especially Catholic.) You have the feeling that even Donald Trump, who makes only brief appearances in the film, doesn’t know Melania very well, because he, like everyone else, isn’t allowed to. And this probably suits him fine, since Trump is the last person on earth to be interested in inner lives. He squires her fondly around the dance floor at the inaugural ball and is obviously proud of her aura of perfection, but she’s his empress, not his soulmate.
Still, Melania does manage to reveal some things about herself in this movie, if only inadvertently and only if you look for them. When she sings along with Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” while riding in the Secret Service limo or does a little shimmy to “YMCA” en route with her husband to the inaugural ball, you get a glimpse of a fun-loving Melania in her younger days. Her personal staff, the White House staff welcoming her for a second round, and others around her seem genuinely to like her. Her extrovert father, Viktor Knavs (who bears a certain physical resemblance to her husband), wanders around videoing everything he sees and obviously having the time of his life.
And there is the matter of her clothing. Melania Trump’s excruciating attention to the smallest details of her custom-made couture has been the subject of the media’s most scathing criticism. “[G]old baubles and designer dresses,” the Guardian‘s Xan Brooks sneered in a zero-star review that compared her to the SS wife in Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest, fussing over her lilacs while Auschwitz inmates are tortured and gassed. They have no understanding that the making of exquisite garments is an art form in itself that demands the highest artistic and craft skills. Maybe it’s because my own mother was a talented seamstress who basted everything she sewed onto a dressmaker mannequin first (Melania’s was a professional pattern-maker), but I found Melania’s attention to the minutest details of tailoring—the height of a neckline, the width of a lapel—mesmerizing. So did her stylist, Hervé Pierre, who designed her inaugural evening gown. The two of them are kindred spirits in this film, grinning from ear to ear.
Melania Trump has her own aesthetic. We see it as she plans and supervises the setting up of a pre-inauguration gala dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington. All is white and gold and sumptuous, down to the enormous floral bouquets, the carved chairs, the ivory-and-gold china, the luxurious table linens. This is not the determinedly minimalist aesthetic of the 2020s. It’s a throwback to the ornate aesthetic of the Austrian Empire, of which her native Slovenia was once a part. Slovenia is the only Eastern European country I’ve ever visited, and like much of Eastern Europe, it either escaped the worst damage of the world wars and Soviet occupation or lovingly rebuilt what had been there instead of falling for the usual postwar Brutalism. The Old Town in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, looks like something out of a fairy tale, or like an operetta stage set: Baroque churches, fanciful stonework and ironwork, a hilltop castle looming in the background. People who have been to Prague or Budapest report similar visual experiences.
Demolishing the Habsburg holdings, Catholic and medieval, had been a project of enlightened modernity since the early nineteenth century, and it was a project that succeeded. Or perhaps it didn’t. It seems to be living on in a corner of Melania Trump’s head, as she shows off the delicately etched Slovenian glassware that will hold the wines for the dinner. So, we have seen a little bit of the real Melania after all.
