‘Melania’ and the Missing First Lady

There’s a striking sequence at the end of “Melania,” the new documentary about the first lady. The Inauguration Day action is over, and the Trumps have taken up residence in the White House again. In voice-over, Melania Trump has just told us that she plans to move forward with purpose “and, of course, with style.”

Portraits of three first ladies appear onscreen with the dates they served: Eleanor Roosevelt (1933-45), Mamie Eisenhower (1953-61) and Jacqueline Kennedy (1961-63). Then we watch a lengthy photo shoot, presumably for Mrs. Trump’s own portrait in her White House office.

This sequence is puzzling, and a little ironic: Why these three first ladies, and no others? Might they signal Mrs. Trump’s aspirations or which of her predecessors she believes she’s already emulating?

But the film itself suggests otherwise. Mrs. Eisenhower’s approach to hostessing was famously down to earth, and she was beloved for her approachable, folksy manner. (“Ike runs the country, and I turn the pork chops,” she was known to say.) That’s not the image “Melania” suggests its subject wants to project.

Mrs. Roosevelt transformed the job, which is something Mrs. Trump professes as an objective. “One of my goals is to evolve the role of first lady beyond formal social duties,” she explains, though the many scenes that follow this statement exclusively depict her performing social duties. Presumably she’s referring to her “Be Best” initiative, which is similar to other recent first ladies’ programs promoting literacy or healthy eating. But it’s hard to place “Be Best” next to Mrs. Roosevelt’s relentless political work; she was known — and admired and resented — for her opinionated involvement in global politics, continuing long after her husband left office.

Neither Mrs. Roosevelt nor Mrs. Eisenhower seem, temperamentally or in practice, anything like Mrs. Trump, who presents herself as aloof and mostly apolitical in “Melania,” on which she served as producer and had a great deal of creative control. Jacqueline Kennedy — with her old-school, chic glamour, reminiscent of a Hollywood star — makes the most sense as a model, since Mrs. Trump’s goal seems to be to establish herself as a tastemaker with a penchant for black and white. At a dress fitting, the fashion designer Hervé Pierre and his team remark upon “your color red, which you chose, which is so beautiful.” And it’s not just clothes: with the event planner David Monn, she discusses a pre-inauguration dinner for big donors. Monn goes out of his way to make sure that we know every decision was made in collaboration with Mrs. Trump, like the party site (“which, you remember, we chose,” he says to her) and the settings (“if you remember, we chose this fabric first”).

If we’re still not convinced that she’s a style icon, the director Brett Ratner throws in some visual signposts. The movie starts with a stiletto stepping from the front door of Mar-a-Lago. As she walks to her car, we’re behind her, observing her glossy hair. When we finally glimpse her from the front, in shades, she’s set up to dazzle. We’ll see that stiletto shot a few more times before she heads up to the gilded apartment in Trump Tower. This glam reveal is exactly the sort used to indicate a fashionista. Think Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada,” or Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and the City.”

Regrettably, few can match those characters’ éclat, and Mrs. Trump comes across not as a woman on a “journey from a private citizen to first lady,” as she puts it, but as an actress straining to play a part while unable to get out of her head. When she speaks to an employee or a designer, there’s a note of theatricality. She tracks the camera out of the corner of her eye. Of course, she was a model before she was a political wife and mother, so she’s an expert at knowing how to present herself in front of a lens.

But it doesn’t make for plausible naturalism. It wouldn’t be surprising if multiple takes were shot for any of this ostensibly real-life material.

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WHAT IS SURPRISING is which first lady is missing from that end sequence: Nancy Reagan.

Politically, the connection would be obvious: “Make America Great Again” is reminiscent of one of President Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogans in 1980, and Trump’s policies are certainly nearer to Reagan’s than Kennedy’s or Roosevelt’s.

There are other reasons to assume Mrs. Trump would want to be seen in the same light as Mrs. Reagan. Many Americans loved Mrs. Reagan: In every Gallup poll during her husband’s presidency, she was voted one of the 10 most admired women in the world. She created a memorable slogan, “Just say no,” for her signature issue, a culturally significant (and widely criticized) campaign to combat substance abuse. And she was known for influencing the president behind the scenes, something Mrs. Trump apparently wishes to do as well; the film shows her tweaking his second inaugural speech and looking pleased when he uses her phrasing.

Mrs. Reagan also loved couture, including meticulously made dresses for inaugural festivities; her sense of style was admired by top designers like Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera. She was known as a gracious host, and she extensively redecorated the White House, collaborating with the fashionable interior decorator Ted Graber (and prompting national controversy). She even had a signature “Reagan Red.”

Mrs. Reagan was an actress before she became a political wife, and to some that could be both explanatory and maddening. In a slyly scathing 1968 Saturday Evening Post profile titled “Pretty Nancy,” Joan Didion spent a day with Mrs. Reagan, then first lady of California. A camera crew was there, too, trying to shoot “the truth about Nancy Reagan at 24 frames a second,” which sounds not wholly unlike what “Melania” is supposed to be. What Didion described, with caustic irony, was “a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.” Didion recounts Mrs. Reagan and the cameramen doing a dry run of her nipping the bud of a rhododendron, just to practice before filming the real thing. The home was a perfectly dressed facade, just like a movie set.

To Didion, Mrs. Reagan seemed to be self-conscious in the extreme, performing the role with “the beginning actress’s habit of investing even the most casual lines with a good deal more dramatic emphasis than is ordinarily called for on a Tuesday morning on 45th Street in Sacramento.” In fact, the Reagans did sometimes describe life in politics in terms of working on a Hollywood set, with call times and parts to play.

THE TRUMPS ARE DRAWN toward the limelight. Much of “Melania” consists of watching people watch them — at an inaugural ball, for instance, where they waltz while everyone in the room holds up phones to film them. Mr. Trump was known as a fame-seeker long before he entered politics, eventually racking up a lengthy show-business résumé, including 14 seasons as a reality TV host (and a cameo on “Sex and the City”). In the five years he’s occupied the White House, many commentators have likened his style of governance to reality TV. As a former model and wife to a spotlight-seeking man, Mrs. Trump, too, understands the game: She knows the effect of nipping in the waistline of a dress, finding a good camera angle — and casting yourself in the best light possible.

Which, in the end, might explain why Mrs. Reagan isn’t in the first lady lineup. It’s a reason that seems drawn from the kind of personal slight that can power half a season of “Real Housewives.”

In the 1980s, as papers in the archives at the Reagan library show, a much younger New York real estate developer named Donald Trump — then a Democrat — sent a series of notes and invitations to the Reagans that were rejected or ignored. Among them was a request for a presidential telegram of congratulations on the opening of Trump Tower in 1983; an invitation to attend a Vietnam veterans’ gala in 1984; and advice on whom to pick for a cabinet position in 1987. Reagan White House aides found creative ways to get around what they privately called Mr. Trump’s large ego.

In 1986, Mr. Trump invited Mrs. Reagan to stay at Mar-a-Lago (which, he told her, was designed to be the “Southern White House”) when she was in town. She declined. In her refusal, which she drafted by hand, she at first included the sentence “I am familiar with Mar-a-Lago.” Then she crossed it out. Perhaps it was better not to boost that ego.

And now neither she nor her husband are mentioned in “Melania,” though one wonders if they’d really mind. The omission, however, is pure reality TV. Fans know the story arc: When someone snubs your party, you snub back.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.

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