In Melania Movie, most telling details are ones off screen

Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent

Here we go again,” Melania Trump trills in the opening scene of the trailer for her new Amazon documentary. The footage in question was captured at her husband Donald’s second inauguration, with Melania peering out from under that much-memed wide-brimmed black hat. But her remarks will also probably echo exactly what most viewers will be thinking when they watch the clip. Here we go again indeed: another glossily over-produced puff piece dressed up as a doc, promising to offer never-before-seen insight into the world of an enigmatic celebrity while actually serving up a few highly curated snippets and a lot of shots of the back of their head getting into cabs (or, in this case, video of the first lady’s pointy-shoed feet trotting on and off Air Force One).

“Witness history in the making,” white, caps-locked text screams from a black background. “Twenty days to become First Lady of the United States of America,” another of these taglines reads. Frankly, if that is the most exciting strategy the filmmakers could come up with to sell their wares — woman who has previously been first lady, erm, becomes first lady again! — then we’re surely in for something truly barrel-scraping. Of course, trailers aren’t meant to give all the good stuff away at once; they’re supposed to be more of an amuse-bouche for the main event. But it’s near-impossible to watch this teaser and genuinely feel as if this film will actually offer us a window into Melania’s psyche. One vaguely revealing moment arrives when Trump asks his wife whether she watched a speech of his, and she responds with “I did not — I will see it on the news”, only for the film to immediately cut away to a shiny promotional portrait.

Perhaps predictably, the social media response has been split down party lines, with various Republican and Maga-adjacent power players claiming they are “so excited” to see the “incredible” finished project, and Trump critics casting far more sceptical eyes over the venture. “People literally cannot afford food. And the ‘First Lady’ is making a movie,” wrote Rhonda Elaine Foxx, the former Joe Biden campaign director of women’s engagement. One anonymous Twitter/X user, meanwhile, scathingly suggested that it might be the “first ever movie to sell 0 tickets”. The Melania movie, though, is arguably just a symptom of a larger entertainment epidemic. Right now, we are in the era of the vanity documentary. Stars, athletes and political figures alike are well aware of the PR (and monetary) value of a movie or TV series that promises to show “the real them” in a raw, unfiltered way. Streaming platforms are conscious, too, that such projects are a huge draw for their viewers (take Netflix’s Beckham documentary, which notched up a record-breaking 3.8 million UK viewers during its first week).

But for all the preamble claiming no-holds-barred access, the end product always ends up feeling like some sort of extended advert, grasping towards a revelation that never really arrives. And it’s always hard to shake off the feeling that the documentary’s subject is the one who’s really calling the shots, rather than the filmmaker. And objectivity, you imagine, is particularly difficult to achieve when said subject has an executive producer credit. We’ve seen this process play out over and over again in recent years. The Beckham family followed up their David-focused series with another Netflix show devoted to Victoria this autumn, which was, if anything, even less revealing than its predecessor: The Independent’s review pointed out its “inspirational soundbites and relentless ‘girlboss’ speak”, while The Guardian went a step further and hailed it as “about as intimate as a Pret sandwich”. The same streamer’s recent Simon Cowell-focused show offers similarly limited insight and never really gets around to asking bigger questions about his music industry legacy. And initial promotion of their Meghan Markle “reality” series leaned heavily into the idea that it would show the “real” duchess, only to offer a highly curated version (admittedly, With Love, Meghan is a lifestyle programme rather than some sort of searing exposé; she’d already done the tell-all thing in the Oprah interview and in her Harry & Meghan doc).

For the most part, what these films and series don’t feature tends to say a lot more than the actual content. Take the smooth way Beckham elided any discussion of David’s then-recent role as an ambassador for the Qatar World Cup. Or the total absence of any mentions of the family’s rumoured rift with eldest son Brooklyn in Victoria Beckham. And when it comes to the Melania documentary, some of the most telling details are off-screen. The fact that Amazon reportedly handed over $40m to license the film just a few weeks after Melania and her husband sat down for dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Jeff Bezos and his then-fiancée Lauren Sánchez, according to The Wall Street Journal, arguably speaks volumes about how the entrepreneur is making nice with the current administration (an Amazon spokesperson said that the only reason for the acquisition is “because we think customers are going to love it”). That Mrs Trump will apparently receive around a 70 per cent cut of that sum is another revealing insight into how she prefers to use her platform.