As an addendum to my main piece on Melania, I simply must discuss the music in this movie. It is bananas. It is entirely cuckoo for cocoa nuts. Its loops are the fruitiest. The first four or so minutes are a montage of Melania driving and flying, and it is all underscored, inexplicably, with “Gimme Shelter,” a song about the horrors of war. Thematically, it makes no sense, but functionally, Melania’s entrance into her own documentary is very much meant to be a cinematic entrance. We see people preparing for her arrival, the camera starts on a close-up of her heels (a point of fascination throughout the movie) and slowly pans up to reveal the rest of her. Why “Gimme Shelter”? One is forced to conclude that it’s because Martin Scorsese uses “Gimme Shelter,” and his movies are real movies, and we’re making a real movie, so we’re using “Gimme Shelter” too. Merry Clayton’s first belted, “Rape and murder,” does line up perfectly with a long, relaxed close-up of Melania’s profile, so that was nice. In that moment, I hoped we might be experiencing true camp.
From “Gimme Shelter,” it transitions immediately into Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” “Well, that’s half the budget right there,” I murmured to myself. We later learn that “Billie Jean” is Melania’s favorite Michael Jackson song, during the only scene in which we see her and (I assume) Ratner have an unscripted and informal interaction. Surely it would make more sense to save that music cue until after we’ve learnt that? I dunno.
What bits of original score there are, from composer Tony Neiman, are perfectly serviceable, though I did find myself picking up bits and pieces of well-known scores here and there. The reveal of the inaugural invitation is filmed and scored in such a way that immediately brought to mind Phantom Thread, so imagine my surprise and delight when the scenes leading up to the inauguration were set to Johnny Greenwood’s “Barbara Rose” cue from exactly that score!
This, too, is a bizarre choice. “Barbara Rose” is an anxious, frantic piece of music, neither triumphant nor joyful nor anything else you would expect in the scenes leading up to the inauguration that also serves as the pinnacle of what passes for a narrative in this movie. The cue doesn’t fit. What’s more, the character of Barbara Rose is an alcoholic multimillionaire who’s privately miserable and disintegrating despite just having recently announced her engagement. It was in this moment that I started to wonder if the music supervisor was up to something.
The soundtrack also includes “True” by Spandeau Ballet, an instrumental cut of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Elvis Presley’s latter-day rendition of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” Ravel’s “Boléro,” and “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” among others. I dunno. It’s a strange set of songs. Talking to another audience member after the screening, they suggested that those may have been songs to which the producers already had the rights. I think these songs are too expensive for that. I wonder if they’re all personal favorites. That’s the only thing that makes sense. One way or the other, “Barbara Rose,” that’s gonna stick with me.