My Review of "Melania"

Five laundered dollars out of five!

I’m glad that you can buy movie tickets online, because I didn’t want to look a human in the eye and say “One for Melania, please.” Though I did consider showing up at 6AM with a lawn chair and saying “Where does the line start for Melania?” Time permitting, I would have loved to have gathered 400 friends, made some foam rubber Melania cosplay gear, and raucously descended on a random suburban theater completely out of nowhere. But I couldn’t make that happen, so I slunk into the theater alone at 1:30 on a Monday like it was 1971 and I was seeing a movie called Muff Police.

I knew going in that Melania is a $75 million bribe from Amazon to Trump. But just because a movie is an obvious money laundering scheme doesn’t mean that it won’t be fun! After all: The all-time bad movie classic The Room may have been a money laundering scheme, and the same goes for Steven Seagal’s late-period movies, and those are basically the Ingmar Bergman catalogue for people who love shitty movies. So, sure: Melania is currency in a bribery racket first, second, and third, and a movie perhaps a distant fourth…but is it interesting?

Well, that depends: Do you consider watching a lady try on coats for 108 minutes interesting?

The inauguration coat is a major plot in Melania. You see, Melania was thinking of wearing one coat, but then she decided to wear another coat. A big bravura scene — the Melania equivalent of the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan — happens when it looks like they might not be able to tailor the coat the way she wanted! But then…yes they can. Crisis averted! Before seeing the movie, if you had asked me how Melania picked out her inauguration coat, I would have said “I’ll bet someone showed her a bunch of different coats, and she looked at them, and then chose one.” I honestly did not need a feature film to confirm: Yes, that was it.

The funniest part of the movie is when Melania claims that the movie is the story that “everyone wants to know”, and then there’s a near-smash-cut to her picking out a bureau for Barron’s room. Devil’s advocate: Did everyone want to know how Barron’s bureau was picked out? Surely someone exists who is fascinated by Barron’s bureau — like all of us — but who is ho-hum about the selection process. I can’t even imagine what footage was edited out of Melania — maybe footage of Melania watching an ice cube melt in a glass of water, or her sitting motionless staring at an ant farm for 90 minutes. Melania is so dull that it makes your average episode of Caillou seem like The Bourne Identity.

60 percent of the movie is Melania being transported places. Did you ever wonder how she gets from the airport to Trump Tower? The answer is: a car. What about from one room in Mar-a-Lago to a different room? It’s hallways, sometimes including stairs. The movie seems to assume that the audience is suffering from Transient Global Amnesia, so if they see Melania in one room, and later she’s in a different room, they’ll freak out and yell “HOW DID SHE GET FROM THAT PLACE TO THIS PLACE?!?!?!?” To prove that Melania is not a teleporting shapeshifter, the movie treats us to excruciatingly long shots of Melania in cars, sometimes accompanied by “Gimme Shelter” or “Billie Jean” to try to provide energy where there is obviously none.

The strangest musical choice is the decision to score a tracking shot of Melania and Donald walking down a hallway with “Then He Kissed Me” by The Crystals. If you’re trying to remember where you’ve seen that before, it’s Goodfellas — it’s the scene where Karen realizes that Henry’s in the mob:

I didn’t need a Goodfellas allusion to know that I was witnessing something deeply crooked; I could piece that together from the fact that Amazon bid $40 million for the rights to Melania and spent $35 million on marketing. For context: The second-highest bid was $16 million, and marketing for a documentary is usually “We’ll give you a ride to Kinkos so you can run off however many fliers you want to pay for.” Amazon also got no access for their $40 million: The movie contains no information about Melania’s life before Trump, and she doesn’t even sit for an interview — she provides a few trite voiceover lines that sound like if you ran Chat GPT through a Teddy Ruxpin. But don’t worry: The Amazon deal also includes a three part docuseries, so Amazon will make its money back if big audiences tune in to see footage not scintillating enough to be included in a documentary that includes the line: “Here’s the invitation. It’s red. Like you chose.”

Melania is a 1 hour and 48 minute insult. Because if Amazon and Trump want to run a bribery scam, they should respect our intelligence by making it a plausible scam. This movie has no reason to exist other than graft — it reminded me of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, in that it was a farcical production resulting from a payoff. Except that the MBAFOAITFOE ceremony was at least big and energetic; this movie contains an extended conversation about the width of a ribbon on a hat.

Each day of the Trump era brings a new insult to American dignity. A company can light millions of dollars on fire kissing Trump’s ass, and it will probably be a shrewd business move. Things have already worked out for the director: Brett Ratner — whom you might know from the Rush Hour movies or the Epstein files — had a moribund career after sexual assault allegations in 2017, but now Trump has reportedly leaned on Skydance to distribute Ratner’s Rush Hour 4. So, nifty: A sure-fire artistic abomination to go with the political abomination happening in plain sight. The good news is that you can simply skip Melania; the bad news is that the corruption that Melania represents will be harder to avoid.

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