Has anyone seen Melania (the film) yet? I have. I went to watch it on Friday morning. The idea was to interview other people watching the movie: to get a sense of why they wanted to see it, how they felt about Melania, how weird they were, etc.
It didn’t really work that well in the end, because most of the crowd at the AMC in midtown Manhattan were journalists trying to do the exact same thing as me. As far as I could tell, three non-reporters attended our showing. Of the two who agreed to talk to me, one was there because he had a monthly movie theater pass, and the other was a man who, without wanting to be too unkind, had a very low bar for compelling drama. (“I think it’s interesting just to kind of see, you know, how her life really is, at least to some extent,” this person told me.)
Notwithstanding my sparsely attended screening and photos of empty theaters on social media, a surprising number of other people watched the film. Melania earned $7m over its opening weekend. (Amazon spent $75m making and promoting the film.)
Melania also managed to record those numbers despite being demonstrably bad. Like, really rubbish.
Regrettably for the subject of a documentary, Melania Trump is not an interesting person. There are no real insights to take away from the movie because she doesn’t seem to do anything. In a scripted voiceover which rears up throughout the movie, Melania describes herself as “a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend”, but based on the evidence of her film, she has no friends. She moves from one stilted, awkward conversation with her staff to another, all parties seeming uncomfortable with each other as they discuss how tightly a scarf should fit and whether a hat is big enough.
There is little to be seen of Donald Trump in the movie, although in one of the few compelling scenes, we hear him on the phone to Melania, talking to his wife like he talks to Fox News, all “big” numbers and “record” wins. Unlike Fox News hosts, Melania gives her husband short shrift, umming and ah-ing her way through the call before essentially hanging up.
Ahead of its release, Donald Trump described the movie as “unforgettable” and “a must watch” – two easily debunked claims – but the president having poor taste in movies is hardly surprising, given his approach to the arts mostly seems to involve shutting them down.
The White House held the premiere for Melania at the Kennedy Center on Thursday. Rather than being a who’s who, the guestlist was a veritable “Who Is That?”, with invitees including Pete Anthony Sciarrino III (described in news reports as a “social media magician”), a slew of Florida-based socialites, and reality TV stars turned convicted fraudsters Todd and Julie Chrisley (Trump pardoned the pair last year).
Also bumping up the numbers at the premiere: almost all of Trump’s cabinet, presumably attending because they were really keen to watch a 1 hour and 48 minute movie about how their boss’s wife unsettles almost everyone she encounters, rather than attending out of obligation.
For all Trump’s love of the movie – he claims to have watched it twice – it doesn’t seem to have altered his slash-and-burn approach to arts patronage and funding. Three days after the screening, he announced that he would close down the Kennedy Center for two years, in order to bring it to the “highest level of success, beauty, and grandeur”, which presumably means adding gold leaf and putting his name on the front.
Curiously, Trump’s announcement came after many performers cancelled planned shows in response to the president’s government and his takeover of the Kennedy Center – which saw it rebranded the Trump-Kennedy Center and led to ticket sales plunging.
If that move seems to have been born out of a fit of pique, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given Trump has assailed the arts since taking office.
He has canceled more than 1,000 grants to arts groups while cutting funding to some museums and attempting to reshape the tone of others. He has sued television networks, and tried to get them to cancel the shows of hosts such as Jimmy Kimmel, a critic of the Trump administration. Just this week, Trump claimed he would sue Trevor Noah after the comedian made a joke about the president at the Grammys.
Architecture hasn’t escaped the president either: he has bulldozed the East Wing of the White House to build a big ballroom, prompting preservationists to sue out of concern the new structure could clash with the original building. Inside the White House, Trump has slathered the Oval Office with gold, while down the road he is hoping to build a gigantic arch.
Is it any surprise that in a movie that’s as bland as one of Trump’s well-done steaks, as insipid as one of his soliloquies about how he washes his hair, the president has finally found a piece of art he doesn’t want to destroy?
