I have no idea if Brett Ratner is guilty of the allegations that derailed his top o' the cinematic mountain career nearly ten years ago, though I'm nearly 100% certain that he is guilty of the egregious cinematic crime known as Melania.
It's a weird thing to think that Melania might serve as a career resurgence for the producer/director known for such films as Rush Hour, X-Men: The Last Stand, Red Dragon, and Hercules among others before sexual assault allegations derailed his prolific career.
So, let's just start with the basics. Melania is awful. I mean, seriously. I mean, John Wayne Gacy comes off better in Gacy than Melania comes off in Melania. While I'm sure it's going to be the film critics who receive the wrath for Melania's scathing reviews, the truth is that this cinematic disasterpiece and inevitable Razzie winner rests squarely on the carefully coiffed shoulders of Melania herself and a genre director who's clearly dabbling in the wrong genre.
Melania was a golden opportunity for Ratner, quite literally, to not so much rejuvenate his career but to at least remind us we we should miss him a little bit. Instead, Melania is a reminder that Ratner's direction was never more than one-note histrionics lacking in humanity. Acquired by Amazon, reportedly sight unseen, for the highest amount ever paid for a political doc, Melania follows our sloppy second time around FLUSA in the three weeks leading up to Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration.
How does Melania feel about the inauguration? We'll likely never know. How does Melania feel about the inauguration? We'll likely never know. How does Melania feel about Jimmy Carter's death? You get the idea. We'll likely never know. Heck, even when talking about the one-year anniversary of the death of her own mother we're left mostly in despair waiting for anything remotely resembling a feeling as she
to Donald Trump’s second-term inauguration in late January 2025. Presumably because Melania’s on-screen presence principally conveys a deep commitment to avoid looking straight at the camera, she provides narcotized passages of voiceover, letting us further into her world. As it turns out, there is not much there. Melania spends its agonizing first section observing as the returning First Lady gives minor notes about adjusting her inaugural-ball dress, droning on vaguely about her roots as a fashion model and style expert, while others drone on in brief, equally vague interviews about the same non-subject. There’s no conflict, no drama, no anything. Fascism does like its pre-ordained victories and fancy outfits.
A week later, Melania is called upon to attend the funeral of former president Jimmy Carter. It is not surprising that she has absolutely nothing to say about Carter himself, and quickly pivots to how the funeral is coinciding with the one-year anniversary of her own mother’s death, visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York later that evening. But her lack of further insight, even into the obviously preferred subject of herself, is striking. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard someone eulogize their own mother so robotically, so devoid of the merest detail of their personality or sensibility. Sample poetry: “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of my beloved mother.” It’s as if she’s describing grief she’s only heard about secondhand. Ratner, sensing a void, cues up a live cut of Aretha Franklin singing “Amazing Grace,” which is either a smarmy reference to the singer’s performance at Barack Obama’s inauguration or, maybe worse, an attempt at triumphant reappropriation.
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That’s the most ghoulish use of music in the film, but there’s no short supply of runners-up. Both of the song cues I mentioned back in the first paragraph have greater resonance as the movie goes on (and on). “Gimme Shelter” and the later-used “Then He Kissed Me” by The Crystals are both famously used in Goodfellas. Ratner is not drawing any sly parallels to the gangster-like shakedowns of the Trump cabal, to be clear. He’s just a shallow student of popular culture, and seems to think it’s cute or funny to score his feeble, supplicating following shots of the Trumps like it’s the Copacabana tracking shot from Scorsese’s masterpiece. “Billie Jean,” meanwhile, is revealed to be Melania’s favorite song by her favorite recording artist, Michael Jackson – also a pal of Ratner. In what is supposed to pass for an unguarded moment, Melania briefly sings along to the song in a car.
These are minor details in the scheme of the Trumps’ destruction, but the movie is nothing but minor details, and the needle-drops reveal Ratner’s cynically antipolitical view of the current First Family. He’s tickled by the way they can like or evoke the cultural touchstones he loves and, in his grasping way, has attempted to replicate in his past movies. Ratner’s filmography is positively littered with big-name stars – not just a peak-popularity Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, but Dwayne Johnson, Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, Nicolas Cage, Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Hugh Jackman, and so on – that do the heavy lifting of making his work feel like real movies, rather than thin facsimiles. Look no further than Red Dragon, about as bad as a movie one could possibly make with Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter backed by an all-star cast, or X-Men: The Last Stand, about as bad a movie as one could make with almost its entire cast and world already established by two previous, very good X-Men movies. Ratner’s trademark is stolen valor that immediately slips through his greasy fingers.
Melania takes this strategy to previously unthinkable extremes, because it mistakes its subject’s fame for star quality, and mistakes a life of leisure for one of accomplishment and importance, forcing him to create a film that’s all lazy patchwork. Ratner supposedly kept filming Melania well after the short frame this pseudo-documentary covers, yet covers her year of dubious subsequent accomplishments through a shamelessly puffed-up yet thinly described credits roll bragging about “initiatives” like Be Better and Fostering the Future, which receive screentime in the film mainly as Melania gestures at nonexistent plans (like “forming a coalition”) in chats with other power-adjacent women. She’s positioned as a champion of children, a stylish supermodeled version of Princess Diana. She notably does not appear on camera with a single child outside of her family.
“Melania takes Brett Ratner’s trademark stolen valor to previously unthinkable extremes, because it mistakes its subject’s fame for star quality, and mistakes a life of leisure for one of accomplishment and importance.”
Is that indicative of Melania’s disingenuousness (as the lives of countless children would go on to be wrecked by her husband’s policies in immigration and elsewhere) or Melania’s (and Ratner’s) laziness? Can’t it be both? Of course, the primary purpose of Melania is a form of public money laundering: Amazon ponied up $40 million for the rights to this movie – more than half of which reportedly went straight to the First Lady under the technicality that she’s a private citizen (even as the movie itself repeatedly claims that she is very much not that) – and spent another $35 million on promoting it. For it to turn a profit, it would have to become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time, or somehow drive massive numbers of subscribers to Amazon Prime. Neither is likely. But the big purchase really just buys some good feelings from the Trump family over Melania profitably cosplaying as a star for the political version of one of those self-produced PR jobs from ego-inflated musicians (yes, Melania Trump has a producer credit here). And if the movie can add some extra RETVRN dog-whistles about having a white woman back in the White House, like a succession of First Lady images that skips straight from Jackie Kennedy to Melania, hey, all the better.
What Melania most resembles, apart from a concert movie that only features songs licensed from other artists (and, I can’t stress this enough, often borrowed directly from other movies; the Phantom Thread score makes a cameo) is the kind of faith-based movies designed for people who hate movies because they spend the entire running time seething that they saw an interracial couple or a heroic Black woman or something. It’s placid and uneventful – truly, people who watch it to bask in Melania’s supposed glamour or to get a glimpse of their hero Donald will be getting all the tedium they deserve – because it doesn’t know how to stop hitting the same note, over and over. Rather has reached his final form by making something that’s not really a movie. It’s just a bunch of footage.
