The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins shakes her head:
For his comeback, [Brett Ratner] has summoned all the artistic ambition of a local Realtor who just got a drone. Backed by the familiar chords of “Gimme Shelter,” the opening scene proposes a documentarian’s corollary to the rule about restaurants with a view: the spendier the soundtrack, the flatter the film. Throughout the hundred-and-four-minute run time, the shoe motif continues: Melania watching television in heels alone; Melania meeting a former hostage in heels alone; Melania sitting on a couch alone and, at the end of a long day, removing her heels. After a while, “Melania” starts to feel like an OnlyFans account crossed with that meme of Kim Jong Un visiting factories. You can’t exactly blame Ratner for relying on a veneer of glamour. How do you capture a subject whose feet are more expressive than her personality?
Collins adds that “as hagiography, Melania is strangely self-defeating”:
We are told, for instance, that Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs, is an avid videographer, but the film is devoid of baby pictures, family mementos, or any of the other low-hanging archival materials that typically serve to humanize a distant subject. She is a woman without a past, effacing biography just as her husband erases national history. (As I noted in 2016, their four-hundred-and-fifty-person wedding included all of three guests from Melania’s homeland: her mother, her father, and her sister.) Melania says that everything she does is for “the children,” but no actual children appear in “Melania.” Nor do pets, friends, hobbies, or music, except in a sad little scene in which she struggles to sing along to “Billie Jean,” supposedly her favorite song. You almost wince when her towering adult son, Barron, brushes her off without so much as a peck on the cheek.
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