Writes William Thomas at Empire:
In 1935, Adolf Hitler commissioned director Leni Riefenstahl to make Triumph Of The Will, a highly nationalistic and likely heavily staged account of the Nazi Party’s 1934 Nuremberg rallies. It was a key moment in the history of propaganda films, a coldly fascistic conceptualisation of Germany as the Nazis hoped to recast it, produced with full participation and collaboration of an authoritarian regime. Melania, on the other hand — a new documentary about Melania Trump, wife of President Donald Trump — is more like Triumph of the Shill. It is political propaganda at its most transparent — cynical, pointless, and very, very boring.
He also notes the missed opportunity:
There is no drama to speak of, no tension, no narrative arc. Melania’s life story is undeniably fascinating: a former model and beauty queen, born in Soviet-era Yugoslavia, an immigrant who improbably clawed her way to the top, making the White House her home — twice. Within her life, you can surely find the story of America in microcosm: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to start a luxury jewellery line! As a public figure who rarely gives interviews, she is a mystery, a cipher hiding behind designer sunglasses, surely waiting for her story to be told.
But this film is uninterested in backstory, in delving even remotely under the surface.
