Opening with the Rolling Stones’
Sympathy for the Devil and going on to unleash such undeniably evocative needle drops as Tears for Fears’
Everybody Wants to Rule the World and
Then He Kissed Me by the Crystals (the latter arriving in a moment that deliberately echoes the famous Copacabana shot in
Goodfellas), Brett Ratner’s new pseudo-documentary
Melania proves that the filmmaker is no dummy.
Yet everything surrounding his film’s expansive and expensive soundtrack also cements Ratner – and
everyone else associated with this project, up to and including its distributor, Amazon MGM Studios – as particularly abhorrent enablers of a vanity project gone mad.
What you need to know about Amazon’s Melania Trump documentary
Designed as a fly-on-the-wall portrait of the days leading up to the 2025 presidential inauguration from the vantage point of
Donald Trump’s wife, Ratner’s film commits too many cinematic sins to count. (Not that Trump is exactly in the habit of accepting any official tallies.)
There is the film’s thoroughly fawning and toady vibe, with the director frequently piping in off-camera to compliment his subjects or wish the U.S. President “sweet dreams.” There is the noxious visual style, which jumps between too-slick drone footage and faux-artsy Super 8 shots, the latter of which cannot help but force audiences to wonder whether the movie is about to slip into full-on, ghastly Zapruder mode.
