Let’s get this out of the way: “Melania,” the new documentary about first lady Melania Trump, is not a good movie.
I mean: It’s possible you’ll like it if you’re a Trump superfan who likes everything Trump does.
The movie is full of drone shots and lingering looks in and outside of SUVs and private planes. There are lots of glimpses inside the White House, Trump Tower, and Mar-a-Lago. There’s also some very expensive music licensing that brings you a sampling of artists you might hear at the beginning of a Trump rally, including the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, and Tears for Fears. (There’s also a stirring rendition of “Amazing Grace” by Aretha Franklin that’s the most moving thing in there, and jarring in context.)
But I think even director Brett Ratner knows he’s made a dull, inert product, where zero interesting things happen. That is presumably why, halfway through the one-hour, 44-minute-long movie, he starts inserting grainy Super 8-style footage into the shots, simply to give the thing additional texture. Like crumbling some crackers on top of a sodden hot dish.
The best way I can describe this one is something akin to a wedding video: Maybe the subjects of the video will want to watch it (Melania looks, unsurprisingly, like a woman who used to be a model; her husband seems notably more spry than he does now, a year after it was filmed). It’s hard to imagine anyone else will.
But that’s just my opinion. What does someone who hasn’t been reporting on the damage caused by Donald Trump’s administration think?
“I think it’s perfectly well made,” says Jamal Caesar, who describes himself as a writer/director who is also a Melania fan. “I think everyone, actually, will like this movie.”
I talked to Caesar on Friday afternoon, after watching a 10:30 am “Melania” screening near Union Square in Manhattan. My thought was that I could find other people there who weren’t me to interview about the movie.
Alas, 11 of the 14 other people in the theater were other journalists or their friends, doing what I was doing. One of the other three was a woman who said she liked someone involved in the movie, but didn’t want me to identify her. “Hell no. I’m not a Trumper.” The two other men had told me before the movie started that they weren’t journalists. They zipped out of the theater before I could ask them what they thought.
So, for the record: Caesar, who says he went to both Trump inaugurations, said he thinks the movie is particularly good at showing “opulence — one of the things Trump and their family is most known for.”
“Everyone is sort of interested in glamour, and that’s what this brings to life,” he added.
Will other people actually watch, and/or like, this movie? We have no idea. We know that Amazon is spending a reported $75 million on production and marketing for “Melania,” and distributing it widely in theaters before it starts streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video later this year. So everyone’s going to get a chance to weigh in, one way or another.
And it’s the opposite of surprising that a morning Manhattan screening — on a very, very cold day — only brought a handful of ticket buyers/professional rubber-neckers. Puck’s Matt Belloni says he’s seen projections that show the viewership for this one — at least in theaters — will be roughly split between red and blue geographies. So we’ll see.
But of course, the whole point of this movie isn’t to generate big box-office numbers, or even to generate more Amazon Prime subscriptions.
Amazon’s spending on this documentary is so out of scale with any other doc that the only way to view it is as a gift from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to the Trump administration — one of the many, many donations American businessmen have made to the administration in the last year. (Amazon’s stock line about this: “We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it.”)
So the only real question for Bezos and Trump is: Was it worth it?
