Melania review: "A preening, scowling void of pure nothingness" (Independent UK)

[Tanuki]

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/melania-trump-movie-review-documentary-b2911108.html

"......Instead, Melania focuses on 20 days running up to the second Trump inauguration in January 2025. “Everyone wants to know,” Melania growls in voiceover, “so here it is.” Perhaps her lack of specificity on what exactly people want to know is deliberate. The documentary – with a runtime of 104 minutes – covers everything from the design of place settings and the width of hat ribbons to her excitement for her son Barron’s hypothetical “beautiful family” and sadness at the 2024 death of her mother. “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my mother,” she laments in the film’s signature voiceover, while the camera holds a shot of the coffin of President Carter. This is American history through the idiosyncratic prism of a woman who is part-puppet of the regime, part-delusional creative, and part-symbol of America’s immigrant community.
....
To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a “mother, wife, daughter, friend”, yet is only depicted preening and scowling. Figures like Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan appear to bolster Melania’s geopolitical credentials, yet time and again she returns to banal aphorisms. “Cherish your family and loved ones,” she implores audiences, who were, up until then, neglecting their family and despising their loved ones. Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness. Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving – with the country on the verge of an irreparable schism – the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau, or Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet.

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. Organising plans for his return to the White House at 2am, after the Starlight Ball, Trump announces he will immediately “begin straightening out the nation”. “We’re all very grateful,” his event producer whimpers sycophantically. It is a visceral moment where audiences, around the world, will begin to taste the boot that the American establishment so blithely licks.

Then again, perhaps Melania is merely a piece of post-modern post-entertainment. After all, it is transparently not a documentary. Melania spends most scenes playing a staged version of herself, and shots of the first lady are composed with all the deliberateness Ratner brought to his work on X-Men: The Last Stand. This is somewhere between reality TV and pure fiction. As Donald and Melania waltz on the eve of their victory, a singer blares out: “Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.” Whose truth it is, however, and where it’s going, seems beyond the power of this captured documentary to reveal."