Melania: an ‘ice-cold’ documentary

“Melania Trump – born Melanija Knavs – has led an undeniably fascinating life,” said Nick Hilton in The Independent. Raised in a housing complex in what is now Slovenia, she started modelling in her teens, and in the 1990s landed up in the US, where she eventually met Donald Trump.

Hers is “an aspirational story” of how “a little girl with nothing but a perfect jawline” conquered America; but oddly, none of these biographical details make it into Amazon’s documentary about her, which was released last week. Instead, “Melania” – for which the First Lady was paid a reported $28 million (£20 million) – focuses on the 20 days leading up to Trump’s inauguration last year. We learn next to nothing about Melania herself; she is mainly shown “preening and scowling”, her face “a mask of pure nothingness”.

‘Designer taxidermy’

There are some revelations, said Janice Turner in The Times: that Melania “hires only people ‘who serve my veeesion’”, that she takes crockery very seriously; and that she finds black and white stuff “classy”.

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This is less a documentary than an “elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch”, said Xan Brooks in The Guardian. Deadly, dispiriting and “spectacularly unrevealing”, it’s “one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality”.

Grovelling billionaires

Well, I was quite interested by how much “crawling” the Trumps’ flunkies do, said Robert Hutton in The Critic. At one point, an aide tells Donald that there will be “the standard presidential parade” before hastily correcting himself: “I shouldn’t say standard. It’s a little bit bigger and a little bit better.”

Then there are the billionaires we see grovelling to the president: how sad, that with all that money, they still have to abase themselves. Which brings us round to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who forked out $40 million (£29 million) for the film, the most ever paid for a documentary, and then spent a further $35 million (£25 million) marketing it. Even the richest have things to fear from its subject’s husband. It is this, not the film’s content, that makes it “an important document in the decline of American public life”.

The film has played to largely empty cinemas, but it does have one fan, said Chas Danner in New York Magazine. I loved it, said Trump on Truth Social. “Check it out – A MUST SEE!”