The documentary Melania, a high-budget film about First Lady Melania Trump directed by Brett Ratner, released this weekend, has been met with overwhelmingly negative critical reviews.
Critics have largely panned Melania, characterizing it as superficial, underwhelming, or propagandistic. Many review excerpts describe it as stylistically polished but lacking depth, meaningful insight, or narrative tension. Major outlets like The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Variety, and The Independent, the dominant sentiment is that the film, about the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, is more self-promotion than documentary cinema. Critics’ consensus currently places it among the worst-reviewed documentaries, ever.
Melania is a feature documentary that follows First Lady Melania Trump during the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump’s 2025 presidential inauguration, offering behind-the-scenes footage of her life, public engagements, wardrobe trials, and interactions with political peers. Produced by Amazon MGM Studios for a reported $75 million (including rights and marketing), and premiering at the Kennedy Center, the film aims to present Melania’s perspective on her role and influence. Despite its glossy production values, critics argue it fails to provide depth, compelling conflict, or substantial self-reflection from its subject, instead focusing on surface details like fashion and ceremonial duties with little narrative drive.
The Guardian – “Trump film is a gilded trash remake…”
It’s dispiriting, it’s deadly and it’s spectacularly unrevealing. Ratner’s film plays like a gilded trash remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in which a button-eyed Cinderella points at gold baubles and designer dresses, cunningly distracting us while her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and asset-strip the federal government.
The Guardian
Vanity Fair – “All the Money In the World Can’t…”
It’s hard to tell whether Melania herself finds it all as dull as I did: she remains inscrutable through most of the film, her face frozen into an elegant mask.
Vanity Fair
NPR – “Amazon’s airbrushed and astronomically pricey portrait…”
… But that will be fodder someday for a far better documentary than the curated, airbrushed, glamorously dressed portrait that is Melania.
NPR
Variety – “Documentary Is a Cheeseball Infomercial of Staggering Inertia”
“Melania” is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert.
Variety
The Hollywood Reporter – “Documentary Is an Unabashed, Fly-on-the-Gilded-Wall Fawn Job”
To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it.
The Hollywood Reporter
BuzzFeed – “Is propaganda always this dull…”
The “documentary” is shot with the style of a music video, or perhaps a screensaver. The titular woman spends the entire movie talking in vague statements, the kind you’d expect from an absent father using ChatGPT to write a wedding speech.
BuzzFeed
Consequence – A flat and lifeless portrait of the First Lady, by the guy who directed the worst X-Men movie
Describing Melania as a documentary implies that there’s meaningful, thoughtful intention to its construction, which is very much not the case. Call it a document, instead, of 20 days in the First Lady’s life circa January 2025, with all the weight and depth of a Post-it.
Consequence
Independent – … pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda
The “film” is part propaganda, sure, and part sop to Big Tech companies who require constant regulatory approval for financial manoeuvrings. Even then, it is bad. It will exist as a striking artefact – like The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will – of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly.
Independent
The Irish Times – Shameless propaganda that could put you to sleep
If one was being less compliant one would describe Ratner’s project as shameless propaganda. But not active, forceful propaganda in the school of Leni Riefenstahl’s films about the Nazis. Melania: The Movie appears keener on inducing narcolepsy in its viewers than energising them into massed marching. Triumph of the Dull, perhaps.
The Irish Times
Deadline – Shallow love letter to the First Lady’s White House return is self-serving and dull
Aside from looking like the whole thing was written and produced by her staff, Melania makes the cardinal sin of just being simply, butt-numbingly boring, especially in the forever-taking last act of sitting through the inauguration all over again in eye-drooping detail.
Deadline
The Wrap – A shameful cinematic suck-up masquerading as a real documentary
Brett Ratner’s tasteless, tedious, criminally shallow propaganda puff piece “Melania” is nearly two hours of self-congratulatory torture.
The Wrap
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.