In the United States, one can not see the ‘Melania’ movie without preconceived notions based on our personal politics. Rotten Tomatoes might give it a whopping 11% rating on their tomatometer, but reviewers from other countries can see the film with a outsider’s perspective. It turns out that the reviewers making up half the audience were none too pleased about being forced to waste 2 hours of their life but were at least very creative in their panning.
The Guardian: Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest
No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. 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.
The Independent: First Lady is a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda
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.
Empire:
In 1935, Adolf Hitler commissioned director Leni Riefenstahl to make Triumph Of The Will, a highly nationalistic and likely heavily staged account of the Nazi Party’s 1934 Nuremberg rallies. It was a key moment in the history of propaganda films, a coldly fascistic conceptualisation of Germany as the Nazis hoped to recast it, produced with full participation and collaboration of an authoritarian regime. Melania, on the other hand — a new documentary about Melania Trump, wife of President Donald Trump — is more like Triumph of the Shill. It is political propaganda at its most transparent — cynical, pointless, and very, very boring.
The Globe and Mail: Amazon’s painful Melania documentary is an unintentionally perfect portrait of American cruelty
The very worst part of Ratner’s flimsy piece of propaganda is that it is thoroughly, terminally boring. Even the most agitated progressive will walk into Melania and, looking for a fight, exit merely groggy and exhausted, if not induced into a full-on slumber.
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In attempting to make a grand and heroic portrait of the first lady and the political moment surrounding her, Ratner has accidentally delivered the ultimate chronicle of 21st-century excess and greed, a world of casual yet immense cruelty covered in flop sweat and gold glitter.
As for Americans not in the Trump cult, Buzzfeed’s Natasha Jokic sums up our feelings well.
Last night, I left an empty chickpea can on my counter. When I came back 30 minutes later, small, black bugs had swarmed the tin and were crawling over my sink. I would rather relive that moment a hundred times over than have to watch another minute of the movie Melania.
