Melania review: Ambient Sycophancy
Director: Brett Ratner
Stars: Melania Trump, Donald Trump, Hervé Pierre, David Monn, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Joe Rogan, Tim Cook, and Elon Musk
Running Time: 104 minutes
“It forgets to hide the grave reality where the rich eat the rest of us so slowly, we can hardly feel it.”
Following the perplexing news of Donald Trump personally requesting Paramount to green-light the much unneeded Rush Hour 4 back in November 2025, his coercive insistence makes more sense when you consider the director of Amazon’s new documentary, Melania, depicting the exquisitely shallow existence of the First Lady of the United States, is directed by one Brett Ratner, the director of the Rush Hour trilogy. He is also an accused sex predator, with a sordid list of sexual harassment allegations and a newly released Epstein photo to his name. If this isn’t enough to sow the distaste of his continued career, his new documentary will aptly provide many reasons for his troubling professional persistence. With a production cost of $40 million, and a combined marketing release of $75 million, Melania is certainly the most expensive documentary of all time, an extraordinary fact when one sees the finished result: an inane endeavor, guaranteed to loose money but buy Amazon political influence from the most disturbing and powerful American family of the last hundred years. If Melania can be described in horror-movie terms, it’s a nightmarish vision about how corporate interests and quarterly profits enable a nauseous level of sycophancy to an individual who least deserves it.
As a piece of propaganda it’s also fascinatingly hapless, Ratner himself seemingly incapable of drawing out substance from a subject who is steadfast in remaining impenetrable to scrutiny. If Melania Trump, as reported, agreed to this documentary willingly, it was clearly done under the silent proviso that her thick, personal armor would remain intact. With a predictable and passionless voice over, Melania takes us through twenty days of her life leading up to her husband’s Presidential Inauguration day in January 2025. “Everyday I live with purpose and devotion, orchestrating the complexities of my life, while nurturing my families needs.” And what complexity it is – the opening six minutes is dedicated to her providing minute requests to fashion designer Hervé Pierre regarding her strongly shaped Inauguration suit. Whilst in the hands of Anna Wintour such a scene can prove insightful – in a this-is-how-the-sausage-is-made way – here, one can feel the depressing decent into American Psycho-levels of emptiness as the discourse declines into copious levels of “Wow” and “Beautiful” to replies involving the adjustment of lapels and the cutting of collars. As Melania herself says, “My creative vision is always clear. And it’s my responsibility to share the idea with my team so they can bring it to life.” When she speaks about ‘creative vision,’ she means the ideas that are presented to her by paid and skilled professionals, and by ‘life’ she means the dedicated time and labour of paid and skilled professionals that American’s richest people pay for as part of the President Elect’s inaugural committee.
Whilst Melania’s passion for fashion and interior design is the most authentic aspect of her public profile, it wouldn’t be my first recommendation for providing intellectual substance to the opening scenes of her documentary, since the designers who polish her coattails are more vulnerable and interesting than she is, each underscoring her resistance to performative-public life, one of many tragic ironies Melania fails to conceal, not least because she’s married to an individual who has perfected his own performative-public life. When interior designer David Monn first sits down with Melania to show her the Inauguration invitations, he can’t stop the goosebumps from tingling his skin when he announces that “No one. Absolutely no one has seen this yet. You will be the first.” Before he opens the invitation box, you’d be forgiven to think the Ten Commandments were about to revealed. “This is beautiful...paper. You know, some people fainted.” If you live in a world were you believe your event invitation is powerful enough to rob consciousness from the invitee, it unfortunately isn’t one I’m familiar with.
David takes her through the design of the tablecloths, the colour scheme of greige and gold, accompanied with a food course of golden eggs and caviar. Melania tells us, “During my last term, I restored the rose garden, built the Chinese Pavilion, redesigned the bowling alley, the Queen’s room, and upgraded Camp David.” That’s a lot of painting for a single person. By restoring, building, redesigning and upgrading so much historic and delicate infrastructure single-handedly, it’s remarkable she has the time to spend with the David Monn’s of the world, who thank her for all the hard work she does when complimenting his paper. You see, the greatest trick the Trump family ever pulled was convincing their working class voters they understand the needs of working class people. Melania’s documentary misunderstands its purpose so abrasively, it instead offers you a window through which you can witness the disparity for yourself.
“Watching Melania Trump speak to Queen Rania in Mar-a-Lago about how they can help underprivileged kids is a bit like listening to two vampires talk about how they’re going to cure anaemia.”
At one point Brett Ratner interrupts Melania to remind her that today is an anniversary – her and fashion designer Hervé Pierre met eight years ago. After an awkward ‘yes’ and zero eye-contact, you’re reminded that no amount of money can buy good chemistry. When Pierre describes the mystery of his dress’s construction, how it has no seams, how its design never gives away the recipe, you can almost feel the slight spark of intrigue, the joy of a living, passionate, talented human being, but to save us from this intimacy, Melania’s robotic voice-over interrupts to remind us that “Being the First Lady requires managing many obligations.” Thank you, Melania, for saving Pierre from being presented as either too talented or too interesting.
Speaking about her mother, who passed away in 2024, Melania elicits a smidgen of insight into genuine grief, but the film never finds solid enough ground to provide us emotional insight outside of Melania’s continuing commentary: “The love my parents shared was the foundation of our home...it shaped me and taught me what lasting love looks like.” Whilst you can’t deny her feelings are theoretically heartfelt, her wish to have a quiet moment to herself in St Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Avenue feels asinine when a film-making crew follow you there – she’s incapable of communicating authenticity, partly because she’s a textbook introvert, uncomfortable with the observing camera and unnatural in her interactions with other human-beings. The contradictions pile up uncomfortably when she speaks to Brigitte Macron about the issue of cyber-bullying and extended screen-times on social media, whilst ignoring her husbands political success being entirely facilitated by his talent in reducing the quality of online political discourse to breathtaking lows. Watching Melania Trump speak to Queen Rania in Mar-a-Lago about how they can help underprivileged kids is a bit like listening to two vampires talk about how they’re going to cure anaemia. There are good intentions in these individuals, but the economic disparity they reflect back to the world is terrifyingly lost on them. The result is a film with a depressing lack of self awareness. “We need to do better,” she says. Indeed we do.
Donald Trump appears intermittently, notably during a meeting where he complains about having his inauguration broadcast conflict with a Collage Football game. “Why did they have to put on the National Championship at the same time?” In true narcissistic logic, Trump conjures his own answer: “They probably did it on purpose.” Melania’s understandable concern is safety, the fear of a sniper’s bullet, the unpredictable nature of America’s explosive culture that so often fuels the radicalised. Her only son with Donald, Barron, won’t leave the car at certain events for fear of his own safety.
Their attendance at an Arlington Cemetery event that pays tribute to soldiers who died during the disastrous 2021 Afghan evacuation both serves to depict Trump’s patriotic posturing and provides an opportunity to underline Joe Biden’s failures – without this double-hander, Donald Trump would be duly uninterested in celebrating fallen soldiers (“losers and suckers”). “As First Lady I carry each of their memories in my heart with humility and gratitude.” It’s notable Trump has his own personal umbrella holder, whilst Melania holds her own.
If the level sycophancy is unclear, at a candlelight dinner for his campaign donors, the real power-brokers of Trump’s victory are revealed: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Joe Rogan, Dana White, and Elon Musk, amongst many others. The documentary is keen to depict this dinner as another notch on the club of winners, a cordial affair of friends celebrating good fortune – but the reality sinks in as they’re served their golden eggs and caviar: you are witnessing the minute cabal of ultra-wealthy kiss the ring of a man who will defer to their wealth driven whims. This may not be problem isolated to Donald Trump, but this is the first time I’ve seen a company like Amazon pay $75 million to promote the brazen nature of this collusion in theaters – if you didn’t laugh at the lack of self-awareness, you’d cry at the damage to come. Ratner thinks he’s covering the First Lady’s experience, but, instead, he’s depicting the late-stage sell off of political power to large corporate interests. As hands are shook and backs are patted, it would be crime if they hadn’t influenced the laws themselves.
The last thirty minutes are an hour-by-hour breakdown of a whirlwind Inauguration Day, a slow-burn, ambient depiction of modern Rome, with it’s enormous rooms, multiple balls, priceless jewellery, designer dresses, tailored suits, and eternal clapping. It concludes that the bubble of U.S. Presidential privilege is more of a golden dome of servility. Donald and Melania walk with careful steps to a stadium of cheering fans simply to see them dance on a bare stage, the charmless couple who defined the economic convenience of their marriage many decades earlier. When Melania watches the coverage of this procession on Fox News, the sycophancy comes full circle, and for a small moment you can actually understand why Donald Trump sees his populist behaviour as perfectly acceptable – when bar-hopping to three different balls for your own benefit becomes your reality, why wouldn’t you think you can do anything? The vapidness of Melania (2026) tells it’s own story – it’s such a seismic failure of propaganda, that it actually provides real insight into the world of ambient corruption that it really should be hiding.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) is what outstanding propaganda looks like, a military fantasy so beautifully rendered, it makes one forget that it promotes a patriotic fantasy of strength and Americana. Melania (2026)’s problem is that it forgets to hide the grave reality where the rich eat the rest of us so slowly, we can hardly feel it. Somehow in the depiction of the life of a First Lady, Bret Ratner’s unconscious lesson is that the enablers of Donald Trump are the real villains in this continuing story of declining empire.
