Is Martha Stewart’s new Netflix documentary Martha a good thing?
Prolific documentarian R.J. Cutler (The War Room; Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry) delivers a brisk (even at one hour and 55 minutes), visually-dazzling chronicle of Stewarts dizzying highs and devastating lows. Cutler has access to many exclusive photos from the entrepreneur’s personal archives, and the story is advanced through interviews with family (including brothers and a sister in law), her daughter Alexis Stewart, friends and business associates, and even caterers.
Mainly, however, it is the 83-year-old queen of good living telling her own story. We see her trimming bushes and dictating instructions around her estate. “If you want to be happy for a year, get married,” she says early in the doc. “If you want to be happy for ten years, get a dog. If you want to be happy for life, get a garden.”
Inside, she is coiffed to perfection and seated in a luxurious parlour room in the Hamptons, with fresh, lavender flowers she carefully trimmed and arranged strategically placed in the background.
When, during an early interview, Oprah tells her she has been characterised as an “intolerant perfectionist,” and then asks how she pleads, Stewart quickly answers, “Guilty.”
Cutler basically spends two hours expanding on that central point. The core interview, returned to again and again, is basically Stewart on the stand, albeit a very ornate and pleasantly styled, palatial estate room stand. She’s sitting for Cutler’s questions, but always with an eye to how this is all playing. When he comes at her with some tough or even just personally illuminating questions, Stewart strives to maintain her cool and to stick to her perfection playbook.
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She can’t style her way out of everything, however. When Stewart is confronted about her less than happy, 27-year marriage to publishing executive Andy Stewart, she tries to gloss past that failure. As a mom she also admits to imperfection, an assessment seconded by her daughter’s memories of a tense family life. None of this helps when your business is all about celebrating and selling a family living ideal.
“What’s more important: a marriage or a career?” a somewhat exasperated Stewart asks. A long pause, then her answer: “I don’t know.”
Stewart, of course, has had some incredible triumphs. She made — and lost — an early fortune in what was then almost exclusively a men’s club as a trader on Wall Street. She rebounded with spectacular partnerships with Time Inc., and K-Mart, vaulting Martha Stewart Living to enormous heights as a publishing, merchandising and television brand. She became the original influencer; the world’s first self-made female billionaire.
Martha is a female power story, which sets up the dizzying fall from grace. As one commentator puts it, “You always want to see Little Miss Perfect fail.”
By the 1990s, Stewart was already getting slammed by the tabloid press when her marriage ended. When a stock investigation leads to insider trading charges, the tabloids went to town. So did James Comey, then a US Attorney in New York and later director of the FBI. Comey comes across as the heavy-handed attack dog of the doc, the man who, surrounded by other bitter males, could hardly wait to make an example of this female billionaire and lock her up.
Stewart was never convicted of insider training. She was caught lying about getting a tip from her broker’s assistant. Imagine, just two decades ago, lying could still get rich people in big trouble. When she was sentenced to five months in jail and spent 150 days in the slammer, headlines screamed “GUILTY” GOOSE COOKED.”
Cutler’s doc does not allow much sympathy for Stewart. She seems stung by and bitter about, her ex-husband’s affairs. Her own indiscretions, one while honeymooning for five months in Rome, are waved off as just moments of passion. When confronted, or ambushed, by a morning show reporter over her trading woes, Stewart kept right on chopping cucumbers.
Back in the slammer, Cutler uses magazine-styled illustrations to show Stewart in her cell. They show Stewart’s discomfort having to sleep on a lousy, bottom bunk mattress. She looks more at home teaching the prison gardener how to prune.
When her term was up, we learn that her boyfriend of many years, who only visited her once in jail, sent his private plane to pick her up. Less than a year later, he dumps her.
That she makes another miraculous comeback is the happy ending not everyone who suffers such a shocking financial and personal setback could even hope to manage. Stewart the celebrity roast queen in her seventies, giving as good as she got back to Kevin Hart, Jeff Ross and others, is very cool. Her late-in-life friendship and business alliance with Snoop Dogg is wild. Martha Stewart just will not be relevant. She is the mother of reinvention.
What she isn’t is perfect. Neither, apparently, is her own assessment of this documentary. She told the New York Times that she hates the ending. She griped that Cutler didn’t include rap music like she suggested. She ripped an achilles tendon and was still limping at the time of her interview, making her uncomfortable. Nobody needed to see that. It was not a good thing.
Seeing Martha squirm, however, kind of makes this documentary worth watching.
