A still from Melania shows the Trumps heading to an inauguration ball.
Photo: Regine Mahaux

Melania is, supposedly, a revealing portrait of the First Lady’s hectic weeks planning and prepping to retake the White House. The film’s promotional copy promises “exclusive footage capturing critical meetings, private conversations, and never-before-seen environments.” What it does reveal, for the most part, are hallways. Not the grand hallways of Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, and the White House, but the backstage, never-meant-to-be-seen service corridors linking her public appearances to her private penthouses and revving black cars. At Trump Tower, the mirrored penthouse and its diamond-encrusted gold door lead to dim gray halls and freight elevators that connect to a basement garage on 56th Street. The inauguration sends the Trumps pinballing through the back halls of the Capitol to the backstage halls of ballrooms, event spaces, and an arena, where Melania, dressed in head-to-toe couture, walks tensely against a backdrop of exposed piping and concrete walls.

We don’t forget that she’s a model; she takes the passageways like one, confidently clacking down them in her stilettos. But besides the walk, she does little else in them, revealing either that she has no power, no interest in revealing it, or her sphere of influence is only as big as a dinner table. A meeting at the office of inauguration event planner David Monn shows Monn reminding her what she’s doing there. The party is at a venue “which, you remember, we chose,” he tells her as they talk about the details of the table setting. “If you remember, we chose this fabric first,” he says. The insistence feels more like he’s trying to pretend his passive guest was one actively involved than placating a fussy client. At a similar meeting with Tham Kannalikham, the interior designer planning the family’s move into the White House, Melania has only one note: the suggestion that Barron Trump, no longer 10 years old, might need a larger bed. It’s all very strange, especially when the voice-over claims a fashion-designer mother taught her that “even the smallest detail matters” and that her education gave her “a sophisticated design approach.” Shown the invite to the party, she comments, “So beautiful. You know some people frame it?” Of course he does. Hosting, decorating, and social causes — these are all in the typical realm of a First Lady, but Melania seems to be sleepwalking through them.

It’s not surprising that the promised “all-access pass” to Melania shows us no actual decision-making and gives us no actual access — this is purely a vanity project after all, albeit a very expensive one, for which Amazon reportedly paid $40 million to the Trumps for the privilege of covering their production costs and getting distribution rights, an astronomical price for a documentary in any context, not to mention the additional $35 million it has put into promoting it. (Consider, for instance, the $1 million production budget of an Oscar-nominated documentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) The recurring appearance of the backstage hallway seems to promise us a peek of where cameras don’t normally go, but we don’t even get a sliver of domestic space — no breakfast tables, no living rooms, not even a half-drunk cup of coffee. The closest we get to Melania’s private room is a shot of her, already dressed, putting on glasses in a walk-in where every door is closed. Does she eat? Does she drink? Does she cook? We don’t know. As for any sense of her life with the president, all we get is a momentary glimpse of a half-open fridge in a private kitchen when Donald rushes in for a 2 a.m. fix of soda. It’s a scene we can only halfway glimpse — from a camera on the other end of a private hall.

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