Let’s tackle the reality that reviewing a documentary like Melania is practically beyond the point. This movie wasn’t created by artists who felt they had a compelling and insightful story to tell, a revelatory depiction of the human condition that would cause us all to sit back and reflect on ourselves. No, this movie was created to appease and suck up to one important orange-hued ticket-buyer. Amazon bought the rights to the movie for a staggering $40 million dollars, pledged an additional $35 million in marketing, and put out all the stops to open the documentary on the residing First Lady in 1700 screens nationwide. For those not in the know, documentaries are not big moneymakers; the highest-grossing doc of 2025 was Becoming Led Zeppelin at $16 million. Only thirteen documentaries have ever grossed over $70 million worldwide and only 39 have grossed more than $30 million. It’s hard to fathom that Amazon imagined this would become a runaway hit. They’re not that deluded. Think less of Melania as a documentary and more as a transparent corporate bribe by Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, who sure would like favorable consideration from the current administration that interferes in every facet of media to better protect the ego of a soon-to-be octogenarian who needs everyone to constantly be showering him with effusive adoration (le sigh). Welcome to our new American ecosystem, where all corporations are expected to bend the knee in fealty so as to procure favorable dispensation from a mad king always in need.

What is even the point of reviewing something like this? It’s so obviously manufactured in bad faith. Well, dear reader, I guess it comes back to my own martyr complex: I suffer so that you may be spared the same fate. Unless you’re a diehard MAGA member, Melania will be a torturously facile example of unserious people elevating other unserious people for an audience of the unserious to be patronizingly pat on the head and told that, yes, theirs is the true voice of America’s solemn destiny.

The film follows the 20 days before the second inauguration of Donald Trump as the American president. For those of you, especially in endangered minority communities, wondering what Melania Trump was going through when it came to designing the drapes and White House color patterns, fear not! Most of the movie is listening to Melania’s strained narration while we watch handlers and assistants flit about and primp the soon-to-be First Lady while handing her samples. Never has insider access felt so tedious!

Did I mention that this movie is directed by none other than Brett Ratner, disgraced filmmaker who was jettisoned from Hollywood as a Me Too reckoning following decades of harassment? Ratner has never directed a documentary before and it shows. Opening the doc with the Scorsese-esque notes from the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” feels like sacrilege. It’s even worse when played over the start of Melania strutting through her Mar-a-Lago mansion to a fleet of cars. It plays like self-parody but you know nobody has the awareness for that. Ratner asks her such incisive questions like, “What is your favorite recording artist?” like it’s a Tiger Beat interview. Late in the film, he’s heard on camera wishing the president “sweet dreams” in the most sycophantic voice. Really Ratner’s here like everyone else, seeing the craven opportunity to get into the good graces of the president. Ratner has been pushing to get Rush Hour 4 greenlit, a sequel that I don’t even think Chris Tucker (current age: 54) and Jackie Chan (current age: 72) are eager to launch. Not that it matters to Ratner, but it’s been almost TWENTY YEARS since 2007’s Rush Hour 3, which also featured a cameo by notorious sex pest Roman Polanski. Sure enough, in the wake of Melania’s release, Trump was pushing for a Rush Hour 4, as clearly the man whose brain is always stuck in the 1980s has his finger on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist. All Ratner had to do was make a 100-minute fluff piece about the president’s third wife and, voila, one sexual predator in the highest office in the land can ensure that another sexual predator can get his dream project, which I repeat is depressingly Rush Hour 4, off the ground. Also recall that Ratner was literally seen canoodling on a couch with pal Jeffrey Epstein and a group of young women who were certainly there by choice. Ugh.

I actually think a figure like Melania could be an interesting subject for a hard-hitting documentary. The Slovenian model becomes the third wife to a notorious philanderer and crook, enough that he was famously having sex with adult film actress Stormy Daniels while Melania was recovering from the birth of their son. From the outside, this relationship appears entirely transactional, with Trump getting a new, younger, more desirable wife, though not desirable enough to stop having affairs with other women (note: this is a condemnation of Trump, not on any perceived shortcoming of Melania). For her, she gets the security of a man of riches and with that security is the tacit understanding that he can do whatever he wants and she will have to accept it. Getting an insider’s account of all the debauchery and debasement of being Trump’s current wife could be extremely insightful and would make Melania genuinely empathetic for one of the rare times in public life. Granted, she’s made her calculation and stood silent while her husband’s regime has terrorized millions at home and endangered the lives of millions abroad, so let’s cap that degree of empathy. Still, she has a perspective that could be very illuminating under the right circumstances. It’s just that we’ll never see that kind of perspective. It’s too off-brand. It goes against her agreement with the money-man. I don’t fault her for wanting to stay in her echelon of riches and comfort any more than I would, say, a duchess who prefers a pampered life to starving on the streets. I get it, but it doesn’t excuse the lasting damage of being the pursed-lip silent partner to a degenerate with total power. Imagine a documentary about Eva Braun but it’s all about her favorite throw pillows. Not exactly the most interesting angle to take for someone so close to such disruptive and systemic abuses of power.

I take particular umbrage with one angle the documentary takes, setting Melania up as a celebration of immigration, a reflection of the American Dream. It’s more than a little hypocritical for this movie to elevate the immigrant story of Melania while the administration of her husband is targeting anyone it deems insufficiently American, namely people of color regardless of their actual citizenship. When the government’s special masked police are rounding up indigenous people to deport to adhere to an unrealistic and damningly racist daily quota, you know they’re not targeting the “worst of the worst.” Are the “worst of the worse” the day care workers? The family-owned pizzeria? The spouses of American soldiers? Those seeking asylum from persecution and death from hostile governments? The immigrants who have navigated the byzantine system of immigration to become official citizens and who are abducted by ICE for appearing at their court appointments? To manufacture Melania as a symbol of the celebration of an immigrant’s journey is farcical when the Trump Administration is built upon the elimination of immigrants from every facet of society. It isn’t a coincidence that the administration has lowered immigration numbers to a paltry 7500 in 2025 and most of those are white South Africans. She’s quoted as saying, “No matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.” Uh huh. Tell that to Stephen Miller and his dogged desire to Make America as Alabaster as Possible Again.

There’s just not enough material here to cover a feature film, which is why the shallow movie often feels like an overly padded infomercial propping up its star. There are long stretches where you’re just watching people walk or listen to performances. It’s filling time. The whole enterprise feels like you’re watching someone else’s lackadaisical wedding video. There are perhaps two or three memorable moments caught on camera. The first is Trump complaining that the college football championship game being held the same day as his presidential inauguration is a conspiracy against him. His reasoning is that they’ve had the inaugural date for “centuries.” The next is Melania turning the funeral of President Jimmy Carter into her own grief about losing her mother. Melania takes reverence walking through the halls of the Capitol, remarking about the military defending the rights of the Constitution, which is quite ironic considering Donald Trump fomented an insurrection that gleefully attacked police officers to try and overturn an election in defiance of the Constitution. There’s also the line from his inaugural speech that is particularly galling in 2026: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peace-maker and unifier.” Yes, surely history will remember Trump as an instrument of peace when he’s not bombing girls’ schools and pledging to annihilate civilizations as well as other blatant war crimes.

Rather than continue to tell you about the many creative and moral shortcomings of this enterprise, why not provide a sampling of some of the best critical hits on this movie? Here you go:

“I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” – Xan Brooks, The Guardian

“To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies.” – Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter

“Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket.” -Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic

“A soothingly looped AI screensaver.” -Amy Noicholson, Los Angeles Times

“Call it a document, instead, of 20 days in the First Lady’s life circa January 2025, with all the weight and depth of a Post-it.” -Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence

“Ratner’s film plays like a gilded trash remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in which a button-eyed Cinderella points at gold baubles and designer dresses, cunningly distracting us while her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and asset-strip the federal government.” -Xan Brooks cooking again, The Guardian

Anyway, don’t watch Melania. I was never going to appreciate this movie. It was not made for me. It wasn’t made for you either. It wasn’t made for anyone but the First Lady, who had editorial control over the movie, so why would you expect anything other than a stage-managed image-consulted propaganda puff piece on her air of dignified grace and style? Hearing her somnambulant narration over her gilded life and the pageantry of a second inauguration of the most destructive president in American history, it’s enough to make you zone out. While wars are being waged, prices are soaring, neighbors are being rounded up into camps of concentration by masked goons, and corruption and graft reign supreme in a government run by the worst people imaginable, it’s hard not to find a soft-pedaled vanity project like Melania as an offense to the senses. If there are bigger wastes of time at the movies in 2026, it will be a truly hellacious year. This is not being best. This is not being best at all.

Nate’s Grade: F