The FLOTUS documentary doubles as news and redemption.
By all accounts, Amazon-MGM, distributors of the documentary Melania, did not hold courtesy press screenings in New York. One reason suggested is that the distributor feared getting the bad reviews that were inevitable. Pauline Kael once averred that when a studio refused to press-screen a movie, it was a good indication that the film would be interesting. Kael’s wisdom was ignored by the dog-piling reviewers hungry for any reason to lambaste Melania. (How laughable that the Los Angeles Times labeled it “propaganda” after the media’s eight-year lockstep coronation of Obama and the dark days of Biden-era cover-ups.)
Many of us had to attend opening-day theatrical showings to discover that Melania dares give an insider look at the work habits of the first first lady to be blackballed by the mainstream media as if to make her an enigma. It reports on the 20 days in which Melania Knaus Trump prepared for her appearance at the incumbent inauguration of her husband, Donald Trump, as the 47th president of the United States.
Fascination begins with Melania choosing that flat, ultra-chic Spy vs. Spy low-brimmed black hat by designer Adam Lippes. By covering her eyes, it seems to deny prying observers any access to her private thoughts — which, after the raid on her intimate spaces at Mar-a-Lago and after other political outrages, surely must be conflicted. The hat was a deliberate contrast to that chic robin’s-egg-blue Ralph Lauren wrap-suit that exuded optimism at Trump’s 2017 inauguration. And it’s Melania’s fashion sense — her seemingly instinctual, former-model poise — that makes this documentary so striking.
As legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland stated, “Fashion you can buy; style you must possess.” It was a triumph of style that Melania continued her black-and-white theme with Hervé Pierre’s inauguration ball gown featuring the broad, black-silk gazar stripes, which emulated the characteristic sharp, stark signature (not autopen) on Trump’s executive orders. It interrupts the preferred narrative.
It was Anna Wintour, Vreeland’s diabolical replacement at Vogue, along with Dean Baquet, former executive editor at the New York Times, who led anti-Melania interference between the media and the public and who militated against the media’s “normalization” of the Trump administration. Now, movie reviewers have joined Wintour’s goon squad, performing a bully-bitch version of journalism, dead set against any possibility of fairness, or of allowing the public to enjoy a fair-minded, civilized response to democratically elected Republican officials.
In Melania, director Brett Ratner embraces the risk of media backlash. Known for his craft in hip-hop and Mariah Carey music videos, and for the enormously popular Rush Hour film series, Ratner brings pop sophistication to his report on distaff caginess. The woman who spectacularly replaced Michelle Obama — the politicized emblem of racial and gender “change” — is revealed as a natural camera subject.
Ratner looks behind the scenes at the Trump presidency’s challenge to Obama’s racial orthodoxy — a doc so casually daring that Melania can be seen as a revanchist figure restoring a traditional sense of beauty and taste that drives racist progressives crazy.
The jest of bad boy Ratner recalls Bruce Beresford’s 2018 Australian film Ladies in Black, which prophesied the case for a Slovenian immigrant like Melania (played by Julia Orman) becoming a style maven in a new country. (By challenging the media suppression of Melania’s FLOTUS tenure, Ratner’s doc, made visually effective by the cinematography team of Dante Spinotti, Jeff Cronenweth, and Barry Peterson, could be an addendum to the Beresford film.) The case for Melania should be so matter-of-fact as to be inoffensive, but that itself is what disturbs partisan hacks, suffering from what Mike Cernovich calls “media brain.”
This querulous condition is a blight on our culture. Every sentence of Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review (“a cheeseball informercial of staggering inertia”) preens for his boss’s approval and back-slapping encouragement from his TDS-siloed colleagues. His lame put-down — “Yet the politics is there, a touch ominously, in the very absence of politics, in how studiously upbeat and controlled the movie is” — strains with the effort to appear politically savvy without actually finding anything in the film to complain about. Industry trade journalism befouls itself. Apparatchik reviewers know better than to slam a Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton vanity memoir, fearing excommunication from the legacy-media clique.
In the Hollywood Reporter review, a lame pan by pinch hitter Frank Scheck typifies the vilification of the film’s director, reminding readers that Ratner’s “feature film career was derailed in 2017 after numerous sexual assault allegations that he has denied.” Scheck associates Ratner with “many unsavory people” in President Trump’s orbit.
Coming close to actually scrutinizing the film’s content, Scheck concludes, “Before the film ends with onscreen graphics listing Melania’s achievements as first lady in such laudatory fashion that North Korea would blush, she’s shown posing for her official portrait. Doing her best to look both sexy and authoritative, she seems most in her element.”
What’s happening with all the brickbats aimed at the Melania doc is a struggle between cinematic free speech and media suppression. The bad reviews constitute what the fashion world calls an “over-read.” Corporate media is always bad at the semiotics of politics. Did any of those leftist college grads who genuflected at Michelle Obama’s triceps and Jill Biden’s upholstery outfits (lissome vs. mannish vs. dowdy) ever read Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System?
Refraining from any attempt at honesty, these reviewers are the latest example of the nastiness fomented by Robin Givhan of the Washington Post, who thought her journalist role was to be an amanuensis — or lackey — to Michelle Obama, winning favor with media enemies (plus a Pulitzer Prize).
Against the now-entrenched incapacity to practice journalistic professionalism, Melania fights fairly by fighting gracefully. This is Ratner’s most elegant filmmaking so far. As a political gesture, it recalls the volte-face switcheroo where President Trump got the television networks thirsting for a prime-time declaration of war with Venezuela but instead had them broadcast nationwide his early “State of the Administration” report. Melania wins by being both informative and clever. It makes fools of Melania’s doubters, Michelle’s and Jill’s handlers, and those petty media-brain TDS adversaries. That the Melania doc is a box-office success restores faith in truly popular culture.
