I hate watched the Melania movie last night with my best friend. I thought it would be fun to roast together.
The film is widely understood as a vehicle to bribe the Trump family by billionaire Jeff Bezos. His payment of $28M to the criminal family paid off; the billionaire’s company subsequently received a $7B tax break. The project was helmed by disgraced director and sexual predator Brett Ratner.
Unlike other works of propaganda, this movie was not engaging. It was a dull and repetitive affair whose missteps and on-screen sycophancy perfectly encapsulates the cult of personality heading the United States. It is as tone deaf as anything the Ceaușescus could muster.
Over the course of it’s lengthy 1h44m runtime, not once is Melania depicted as genuine. Every second is orchestrated, every phrase scripted, every facial expression calculated. There’s not a single true spontaneous or light-hearted moment; the camera is never an invisible observer. It’s in stark contrast to the few others who share the screen with Melania; they’re aware of the cameras but they don’t come across as desperate to control their image.
Melania’s narration accompanies much of the film but sticks to repetitive vacuous remarks, so you never learn anything about her. You just watch her play pretend in her gaudy home stuck in the 80’s: pretend like she’s designing things when others do it for her, pretend to run a serious campaign ineptly named “Be Best”, pretend to be a loving family, pretend to care as she fails to feign emotion with a hostage victim.
Ratner tries to make her look sympathetic but it doesn’t work because every exchange is conceited and sympathy requires honesty. At one point while he and Melania are in a motorcade, Ratner prompts her to sing what she claims is her favourite song “Billie Jean”. The camera sticks on her while the only lyrics she can recite are the words “Billie Jean”. It starts to dawn that she might have only picked the song for how it would read with the audience. It’s plausible when so many other moments are disingenuous.
At another point, Ratner airs a phone conversation between Melania and her husband. Trump doesn’t display any interest in his wife, instead rambling about his poll numbers like he’s on Fox News. It’s clear that he’s doing it for the audience. Better propagandists would have cut this as it would have made the couple more relatable. Narcissists can’t appreciate the value of that.
Ratner for his part inserts himself inconsistently through the film just as he does musical cues. Towards the end of the film, in a voice reminiscent of a child pining for his father, he tells a departing Trump “sweet dreams Mr. President.”
This film is an inept farce. It was made to curry favour with the vindictive con man heading a fascist regime by favourably covering his trophy wife. It was directed by a sexual predator hired by the same billionaire who killed a newspaper critical of Trump’s abuses.
The paradox I suppose is that to make people look good and relatable, they have show their imperfections. No one involved with this project was willing to entertain that – not Trump, not Melania, not Ratner, not Bezos. So what we’re left with is a rich out-of-touch woman with no thoughts of her own picking dresses while her husband plunders the nation in a film that might as well have been titled “Let Them Eat Cake”.