We have a review! THE MELANIA TRUMP DOCUMENTARY IS A DISGRACE (The Atlantic)

[underpants]

I’ll offer a link that’s supposed to be a gift link.

The exorbitant film captures the rotten state of the entertainment industry.



But very few people have seen Ask E. Jean or even heard of it. Streaming platforms and distributors have steered absolutely clear of a movie that so plainly impugns the president, regardless of its obvious relevance and engaging portrait of Carroll, whose decision to come forward was resolutely in spite of everything she knew she’d face as a result. “We all have a lot at stake here. This lawsuit is not just for me; it almost has nothing to do with me,” she explains in one scene to the director, Ivy Meeropol. “It’s for, really, women across the country.” In court, Carroll faced lawyers for a former (now reelected) president, making the case, as she puts it, that Trump was protected by “his scope of employment as president when he called me too hideous to rape.”

At the Melania screening I attended today, what was most surprising about the movie was how little is actually in it, despite a running time just shy of two hours. Mostly, Ratner captures his subject walking from liminal place to liminal place in five-inch heels, the camera trailing her like a lap dog. She looks immediately uncomfortable being filmed, an effect that never quite goes away. In voiceover, she opines vaguely about wanting the film to capture her motivations as first lady. “Every day I live with purpose and devotion,” she explains, while we see her being fitted for her inauguration outfit, working with designers to manage the aesthetic of the presidential balls, and interviewing various white women with barrel curls to join her staff. She talks proudly about having, during Trump’s first term, restored the White House Rose Garden (unfortunately since converted by her husband into a paved patio area).

Ratner seems desperate to find action, but there is none. The pace is stultifying. The camera lingers on a designer’s aide who trembles at the task of trimming Melania’s inaugural blouse with scissors. We see the first lady videoconference with Brigitte Macron, her French counterpart, about her Be Best initiative. Halfway through, Ratner picks up what seems to be Melania’s father’s Super 8 camera and never puts it down, so the latter part of the film is studded with grainy handheld scenes of helicopters and Arlington National Cemetery. Trump is inaugurated—Ratner uncharitably includes scenes of a backstage Kamala Harris looking pissed off—and we follow the president and his wife to three balls. Melania shows off her custom-made inauguration gown, stark white with black ribbons overlaying it, a dress that now looks unavoidably like the redacted Epstein files.

What’s in the film—lots of shots of tech bosses paying homage to Trump, Ratner trying to get Melania to sing along to “Billie Jean,” Melania’s insistence on the sacred values of the Constitution and its protection of individual rights—is almost less compelling than what’s not. (Any glimpse of Stephen Miller.) But Melania’s heavy focus on its subject, despite her husband being one of the most attention-sucking people on the planet, does raise one interesting question: Is his wife the only person Trump can stand being upstaged by? Throughout, the president seems truly proud and enamored of Melania. “You look beautiful, beautiful,” he tells her in one scene. “Like a movie star.” (I laughed out loud at one phone call, during which Melania, in New York, seems exasperated when her husband won’t shut up about how big his election victory was.)



https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/01/melania-trump-documentary-review/685829/?gift=j8JiJIlliWfcdD_mDVMd99APTCTTKiMQCbQWoCmy9a0