‘Melania’ promises to take us behind the scenes. There’s nothing to see

First Lady Melania Trump. Photo / Getty Images

There is a controversial new Amazon documentary about Melania Trump released this weekend, and every single review I’ve read has been terrible, but babe, if you suspect I have come here today to trash a movie about the wife of a notoriously thin-skinned, anti-journalist president that was bankrolled by the company founded by the man who also pays my salary – NOT TODAY, SATAN. Do you think I’m a moron? (Don’t answer that.) This house is clean.

Besides, before I could pan it, I would need to see it, which ended up being easier said than done.

There were no advance press viewings, which are typically arranged so critics can review a film ahead of its opening. Journalists were allowed to cover the red carpet for the Kennedy Center premiere but not actually stay to see the movie. I drove to an advertised screening in Virginia, but when I got there, the theatre manager told me that it had been cancelled and that he didn’t know why. (I joined the rest of my family in Zootopia 2 instead. Turns out that’s a cartoon allegory about bad policing and demonising minority populations, in case you’re looking for a way to discuss ICE with your kids.) The next day, I walked to my local multiplex in Maryland with a prepaid ticket on my phone, only to find a sign on the front door saying “Out of Order” (The entire theatre?).

“This is getting suspicious,” a friend texted, because we are now all living in a conspiracy theory. “HA HA,” I texted back loudly in case Stephen Miller was listening.

Finally I took the Metro to a showing in Washington, 10 blocks from the White House, where the theatre was offering commemorative “Melania” popcorn buckets as if this was a blockbuster starring Chris Pratt and a Hemsworth, and there were five of us total in the audience and afterward three of us tried to interview each other and that is when we realised we were all journalists on the job.

But you didn’t come here for any of that. You came here to hear about the movie:

1) Melania’s favourite recording artist is Michael Jackson, her favourite song is Billie Jean, and she sings it in the documentary.

2) Although the White House has repeatedly stated that the first lady speaks five languages, there have been few concrete demonstrations of that. But a scene in Melania shows her on a Zoom call with Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, who greets Melania in English but then reverts to her native tongue. We don’t hear Melania speak French herself – and it’s not made explicit whether there’s an interpreter on the call – but she nods and jots down notes as Macron speaks.

3) She was apparently personally invested in the release of American Israeli hostage Keith Siegel, and in her meeting with his wife, Aviva, she shows herself to be a fairly effective comforter: “You are fighting for him,” she says, offering a hug as Aviva insists she feels helpless. “That’s what he wants.”

4) She maintains ties to her Catholic faith, perhaps more than the public realises: The documentary shows her visiting St Patrick’s Cathedral on the anniversary of her mother’s death to light a candle in her honour.

5) The following telephone exchange between Donald and Melania on January 6, 2025, ie, the day Congress certified his second presidential election.

PRESIDENT: “Hi, honey.”

FLOTUS: “Hi, Mr President.”

PRESIDENT: “Did you watch?”

FLOTUS: “I did not.”

PRESIDENT: “You should. It was a big win.”

Then, on the phone with his wife of 20 years, the President begins to recite the numbers of his electoral college victory, which were identical to the numbers the public had known for two months, in the manner of a dog bringing you his favourite toy.

There, you vultures. Are you not entertained?

I … kind of was. The number of columns I have written about Melania Trump is stupidly high. Reviewed her memoir. Reviewed her body language. Reviewed her Christmas decorations. But she has an impenetrable quality that makes it impossible to gauge what she’s actually thinking. (Does anyone else remember when she tweeted a picture of a whale, and asked, “What is she thinking?”) Melania promised to answer our questions.

“Everyone wants to know, so here it is,” she says in voice-over. “Twenty days in my life: family, business, philanthropy and becoming the first lady of the United States again.”

The 20 days in question are the ones preceding her husband’s second inauguration, and the behind-the-scenes footage we get mostly concerns the aesthetics of it all: dropping in on a meeting about place settings and invitations; watching Melania be fitted for inaugural gowns and hats. The designer in those scenes talks about what a pleasure it is to work with a former model who understands her body, and it’s true that these are the scenes in which she speaks the most authoritatively – pointing out where her collar needs to be taken in or her hemline raised – earnestly going on about her “creative vision”.

The woman looks impeccable, at every moment, in every scenario. She boards a plane in Mar-a-Lago wearing the perfect Floridian white sundress; she exits the plane in New York wearing perfect black leather pants. She watches the nightly news in business attire. The stilettos never come off, never; at one point, the camera zooms in on her foot at the end of a long day as she allows herself the tiniest ankle roll, nothing more.

“My mother [always said] beauty comes from dedication,” she tells us at one point, and that’s as fair a word as any to describe the Melania we see in the film. Dedicated, and more zealously disciplined about her external presentation, than most of us could possibly imagine. (Not for nothing, I would enjoy seeing Melania and Barack Obama in a room together discussing lightly salted almonds.)

It’s all pleasant to look at, but it didn’t feel like what you expect from a documentary, an art form that exists to show you what someone or something is really like. Which, for most of us, includes laughing with a friend, futzing around in the kitchen, putting on a pair of sweatpants before watching the news.

In one scene, as Melania references her Slovenian heritage, I found myself thinking of a different documentary I once saw, about the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond trying to export the sitcom to Eastern Europe. The entertainment mostly comes from the cultural differences, the things that got lost in translation. In one scene, the Russian team debuts their version of Debra, the protagonist’s spouse. Only instead of looking like a tired housewife, as the script describes, she’s dressed to the nines. The American team is baffled; Debra is supposed to be relatable. The Russian team is baffled; why on earth would people at home want to watch something relatable? Where they’re from, people want to see something that looks perfect.

What I ended up wondering throughout this documentary, while I kept waiting in vain for director Brett Ratner to peel back another layer on Melania, is if we were dealing with a situation that was not an onion but a potato. Yes, there’s a thin protective skin. But after you breach that, no matter how many times you go after it with a peeler, you’re dealing with pretty much the same pulp.

I don’t get the impression that Melania is hiding her sweatpants from three journalists in a movie theatre; I get the impression that she is hiding them from everybody. That, if she owns a single pair, she puts them on quietly after everyone else has gone to bed.

Her worldview seems based on optics more than reality: that what things look like is as important as what things are like. She carries on about redecorating the White House tennis pavilion not because she is dim but because, in her view, her highest calling is not to give the American public something they can identify with but rather something they can aspire to.

What is she thinking? It doesn’t really matter, honestly. The fact that she is disciplined enough to hide her true personality from the public is, in fact, her personality.

The last scenes of Melania take place on Inauguration Day 2025, following the first couple through their preparations at Blair House, the inauguration itself, several inaugural balls. At 2am, they return to the White House residence, and a member of the house staff rummages through the fridge to find them a snack.

Melania lowers herself to a sofa, then quietly begins to remove the high heels she has been wearing for 22 hours. We see a foot.

It’s a moment that could have been the beginning of a fascinating documentary – and it is also the moment the credits start to roll.

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