In a breathtaking act of artistic cowardice disguised as prestige television, Netflix has released Melania: A Gilded Cage, a film that meticulously chronicles the former First Lady’s choice of china and her war on cyberbullying, while somehow avoiding the seedy, crime-riddled elephant in every room it portrays.
The film, touted as a “penetrating look at a private woman in a public world,” opens with a lingering shot of a gilded elevator door in Trump Tower. It’s a metaphor, you see. For solitude. Or luxury. Certainly not for the well-documented, multi-decade flow of financiers, politicians, and powerful men who visited a certain island or a certain New York mansion under the auspices of a convicted sex trafficker who was a regular guest at Mar-a-Lago and called Donald Trump a “good friend.” That elevator, the film suggests, only ever went to the penthouse. How tasteful.
We are treated to lavish reenactments of state dinners, where the crystal gleams and Melania’s smile doesn’t. The costuming is impeccable. The screenplay, however, seems to have been written by someone who has only ever read the captions under Getty Images photos. A pivotal scene shows Melania reading a binder of schedules. “So many flights,” she murmurs in her signature Slovenian monotone, staring at a page. The camera cuts away before we see the manifest, the client list, or the fact that the plane was nicknamed the “Lolita Express.” The moment is played as a testament to her husband’s bustling, important life. A real missed opportunity to show her cross-referencing it with a guest list for a party at a certain Palm Beach estate—but that would be “salacious,” not “nuanced.”
The film’s director, in a recent interview, defended the choices. “We wanted to focus on Melania’s inner world, her resilience,” she said. “The… other people… the… connections… that’s all just background noise of the political landscape.” Indeed. The “background noise” includes the fact that her husband was publicly accused of raping a 13-year-old girl at an Epstein party (a case dismissed for procedural reasons, which the film interprets as a vindication best shown via a slow-motion shot of a golf swing), and that dozens of his closest associates, from lawyers to advisors, appear in Epstein’s documents. But why focus on a global sex trafficking ring when you can have a five-minute sequence of Melania choosing the Christmas ornaments?
The film’s climax is her 2018 “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket moment. It’s framed as a cryptic act of rebellion against the media. Not, say, a perfectly coherent response to a week where her husband’s labor secretary was fending off questions about his role in Epstein’s plea deal, or his former campaign manager was on trial, or any of the other myriad scandals involving men and their compromised morals. The jacket, the film insists, is about her pain. The trafficking? The compromised justice? The endless list of powerful names? That’s just the boring, bureaucratic world of men. She’s above it. Literally, in a tower.
In the end, Melania: A Gilded Cage is the perfect Netflix product: visually sumptuous, morally vacant, and designed to generate tweets without ever generating a thought. It transforms a saga of profound corruption and alleged criminality into a story of a stoic immigrant who sometimes frowned at her husband. It’s not a cover-up; it’s something far more insidious. It’s a tasteful redecoration.
The final shot is of Melania, alone at dawn at Mar-a-Lago, looking out over the lush lawn where Epstein and Trump once partied. She sips her tea. The sunrise is beautiful. The logs are sealed. The clients are unnamed. And Netflix has once again proven that the most profitable way to tell a dangerous story is to carefully, artfully, tell no story at all.
Streaming Now: History with the history removed.