About midway through the documentary “Melania,” a piece of imagemaking whose interest comes only occasionally and accidentally, the film seems to acknowledge the oddity of its own making. First Lady-to-be Melania Trump, in the days before her husband’s 2025 inauguration, has inked a deal to appear in the very film the audience is watching; her aides are fielding inquiries from a journalist about the potential ethical issues this deal raises. One of the two soon-to-be East Wing workers laughs; the inquiry is destined to go unanswered.

Perhaps it just goes without saying. Whatever benefit the Trump administration is to gain from the message of “Melania,” such as it is, playing out on cineplex scenes nationwide seems minuscule compared to the material gain: Amazon paid a reported $40 million fee to Melania’s production company, and has invested some $35 million more in promoting the film. Before the logo for Muse Films, Melania’s company, the film opens with the banner for Amazon MGM Studios, whose “Art for Art’s Sake” slogan has rarely seemed more ironic.

That’s because the film itself exists as a striking rebuttal to the idea that it exists for reasons beyond the transactional. (Now that Amazon has made a payment to the First Family, perhaps whatever regulatory concerns they are to have in future might be eased.) “Melania” is a fascinating document: An attempt to look behind the image of a person who resolutely refuses introspection, a vérité confessional undertaken by someone constitutionally averse to the act of confession. It plays like a film by Pablo Larraín, that great documenter of female celebrity behind “Jackie” and “Spencer,” minus the moment when our great diva has an emotional catharsis, or expresses an emotion. And it is many things — but it’s not $75 million worth of movie. 

The film’s box-office prospects seem abysmal; it’s tracking very low, and, anecdotally, it became apparent that all of the 20 or so people in my screening room were, to a one, journalists reporting on the movie. Why would civilians care? After all, for much of its 108-minute running time, “Melania” is primarily a film about a woman walking into and out of rooms. This is true from the very first: The movie opens with a lengthy sequence, scored to the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” in which Melania enters a car to leave Mar-a-Lago, puts on sunglasses, exits that car, boards a plane, removes her sunglasses and sits down, her head hitting the headrest just as the “Rape! Murder!” chorus of the song kicks in. (The scoring of this movie, including two plays of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” is gaudily expensive throughout, a funny reminder that pop music is one of our current president’s great interests.)

Melania, here, is spending her last weeks as a private citizen while planning the inauguration, and we are shown that prep at a level of detail that shifts from painstaking to painful. (Not once but twice are we shown lengthy fitting sequences, as she instructing a tailor on the manner in which her inaugural looks need to be altered.) She speaks in voiceover throughout the planning process, delivering paragraphs with incantatory rhythms that can have the effect of concealing that they contain no substance at all. “My education in architecture gives me a serious design approach,” she tells us. Later: “For me, it’s important that timeless elegance shines through in every element.” 

One senses little feeling behind the words, not least because they seem at times to directly contravene what’s actually happening in the world, from relatively trivial to high-stakes. She proudly informs viewers that, in her husband’s first term, she “restored the Rose Garden”; it’s since been paved over. Later, reflecting on the outpouring of support she felt on Inauguration Day, she tells us that “In the end, no matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.” A director not beholden to the Trump administration — unlike Brett Ratner, whom Melania tapped to make this film, and who had previously been cast out of the industry following multiple allegations of sexual assault — might find the interesting friction between these words and the ongoing refusal to acknowledge the humanity of immigrants and those who advocate for them. Instead, the words just lie there. 

Without her script, Melania is stiff on her feet. When her interior designer delivers an impromptu declaration of her pride at having come to the country as a child from Laos and risen to working for the White House, Melania gazes into the middle distance, momentarily snagging her eye on the camera. We cut ahead to a later point in the conversation, in which Melania obliquely acknowledges her own status as an immigrant by asking the designer to place the Presidential seal on Slovenian china.

Perhaps all Melania does lies in shades of meaning, but the shades are so indistinct as to fade into nothingness. On a Zoom with French First Lady Brigitte Macron to discuss the Be Best initiative, Melania declares, “Mental health, anxiety, is just growing around the world because of cyberbullying.” What Be Best actually has done or will do lies beyond the frame.

The film seems aggressively uninterested in exploring the terrain of its subject’s mind — almost as if it exists as an object to justify its star’s talent fee, not as a film. We learn aggressively little about Melania — that her favorite song is indeed “Billie Jean,” to which she sings along, lands like a shock, just because she’s otherwise avoided saying anything at all. She alludes to grief over the loss of her mother, but is not shown demonstrating anything beyond stoicism: When she lights a candle in church in remembrance of her, she’s shot from behind. And when Donald Trump tells the camera, “This one had a hard time” with the loss, he seems to gesture toward a figure offscreen. Melania isn’t shown at all. (Trump is a persistent presence throughout the film, especially as it moves toward his inauguration, but the two speak on a surface level. When he brags to her, in a phone call, about the magnitude of his electoral victory, she replies, “That’s a good one. Congrats.”)

Perhaps there’s something refreshingly oppositional to the president’s rhetorical style in the First Lady’s disappearance; by contrast to the say-everything head of state’s desire for stardom, Melania’s not even a character in her own movie. But “Melania” leaves a bitter aftertaste when one considers just how healthily remunerated Melania was to give the nation nothing at all. Put the film on the pile with Trump University and Trump Steaks and the law-firm and university shakedowns and all the other money-spinning endeavors as evidence of this family’s eagerness to make a buck — and call it one more thing, too: In its shamelessness, it’s proof that this enigmatic woman is, finally, her husband’s perfect match.