Anyone who labels Martha (now on Netflix) “a good thing” needs to just stop it. Which isn’t to say that that director R.J. Cutler’s celeb-profile doc of ace flower-arranger and pastry puffer Martha Stewart is bad and not worth your time – we’ll hold our final assessment for the bottom of this page, thank you – but we should probably try to avoid parroting her catchphrases, for the sake of sidestepping the dog doo of cliches in the backyard of life. Now, we all know that Martha Stewart is a divisive figure, possibly because her pursuit of “perfection” slammed headlong into a prison stint for insider training. So the goal of this doc isn’t to put that cruel and/or hilarious irony in the spotlight – the lady’s been outta the clink for nearly two decades now – but to put the chronically standoffish Martha in front of a camera and see what happens when she’s asked to reflect on such things.
MARTHA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: LET IT BE KNOWN that there are no talking heads in Martha that aren’t Martha. The implication is, Martha is huge. Bigger than everyone else. We hear other voices in this film – you need them lest the director just hand the movie over to his subject – but we don’t see their faces. This was a choice, and it has been made. Now, you know how documentaries so frequently open with a supercut trailer of themselves, teasing what we’re going to see in the next hour or two? Well, this one includes people calling Martha “one of the most powerful women on the planet” and “the original influencer” and the less subjective descriptor, “billionaire.” She was the OG peddler of food and real estate porn who was “maligned for being a perfectionist,” and possibly also because she was a woman who was a perfectionist. And of course, she’s had quite the up-and-down life during her 83 years. Without it, you don’t have much of a documentary.
You might be shocked to learn that Martha wasn’t brought into this world and placed on a doily and used as a centerpiece for Christmas dinner alongside a coddled turkey and exquisitely fluffy rosemary mashed potatoes. She was one of six children, the favorite of her handsome, unhappy, abusive, Jew-hating father. He loved to garden and she adopted that interest – and maybe the rest is history. By the time she was a teenager, she was keeping the struggling family afloat with $15/hour modeling jobs. She went to college in New York City, married at 19, had a daughter, became (please note the foreshadowing buried in this factual nugget) a stockbroker, moved to Connecticut and restored an old house to her exacting specs and began hosting grandiose parties for the rich influential people he invited over as the head of a publishing company.
She spun her interest in entertaining into a catering company that fed famous folk and became a million-dollar business. At this point, Martha was the boss of people, and often let them know she was the boss: “She was a bitch,” says one voiceover interviewee, while other voiceover interviewees rightfully point out that her demanding, ruthless demeanor would be considered a positive trait if she were male. (We see her demeanor play out live in the current day, as she micromanages the gardeners in her employ, showing them how she wants her bushes trimmed and sternly urging them not to break any pots.) Martha began publishing books about cooking and weddings and gardening, and before she knew it, she was on TV, putting out magazines and leading a massive multimedia empire on her quest to make everything around her, in her own words, “perfectly perfect.” Meanwhile, her marriage of 27 years crumbled – he cheated more than she did, Martha matter-of-factly dishes – and her daughter, with whom Martha is close, says she learned from her parents how to suppress her emotions. Perhaps this, and Martha’s similarly emotionally closed-off upbringing, explains the frosty, calculated edge we sense when she looks laser-eyed into the camera and says “it’s a good thing.” And there was Martha, promoting her book Weddings, when her own marriage was far from perfect.
At this point, Martha asks Cutler, “Can we get on to a happier subject?” So we do: Her deal with KMart, which put all her fancy products on shelves that anyone could reach – a shrewd move that not only shrank the distance between trailer parks and the Hamptons, where she moved after the divorce, but also earned her massive piles of money. Martha Inc. eventually went public on the New York Stock Exchange, making her a billionaire, a very tall very high perch from which she would never ever fall and she lived happily ever after the end. No! She ended up tangled in an insider-trading web that found her answering difficult questions on morning shows while she’s just trying to chop cabbage. And she was the scapegoat of James Comey and a lot of mean lawyers, she insists now. Don’t worry, everything ended up being OK, despite her five-month stay in the joint and subsequent drop in Wall St. market value. Inevitably, one of the interviewees declares, “she’s been set free by going to prison.” So much irony in this story!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Marie “Does It Spark Joy” Kondo might be running the register at The Container Store if it wasn’t for Martha “It’s A Good Thing” Stewart. Otherwise, Martha is similar in style and structure to Cutler’s other profile docs Belushi and Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry.
Performance Worth Watching: Martha Martha Martha! She’s pretty much the only person in this doc. Be grateful that Cutler tries to push her out of her comfort zones, or the movie might be less compelling and a far tougher watch.
Memorable Dialogue: Martha’s still angry about going to prison: “Those prosecutors should’ve been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high,” she says, every the wily marketer who knows exactly what she’s saying, because pieces like this very one you’re reading right now will inevitably quote her.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: As someone who’s never been to the Hamptons, I only have an impression of the community as being many Martha Stewart Living centerfold spreads come to life. And I imagine it being an awful overstyled money-drenched Stepford hell full of food that’s too pretty to eat, cooked by people hired by people who are accordioned paper dolls draping $900 scarves over $3,200 sweaters. I could be wrong. But this is why Martha Stewart rubs so many of us the wrong way, having enriched herself so mightily by selling her cold, lifeless, thoroughly upper-crust Caucasian aesthetic to people who will never, ever achieve it.
But the point of this doc is to illustrate Martha’s complexity, and poke holes in our attempts to pigeonhole her. Despite her apparent lack of warmth in nearly every context, she comes off in the documentary as someone who simply wants to surround herself with beauty – a wholly relatable trait. Her KMart deal was marketing genius and exploitation at the same time it reflected the empowering do-it-yourself philosophy she offered to average folk. You don’t connect with so many people (or sell so many products) if there isn’t an element of truth in the subtext. And she was a highly intelligent innovator who used women’s traditional interests to transform herself into a feminist icon of sorts: America’s first female self-made billionaire. The Martha Stewart conversation can be just as fraught and complicated as the one surrounding Barbie.
So there’s a lot to dislike and a lot to admire about Martha, in roughly equal amounts. Similarly equal are Martha’s moments that challenge its subject, and those that flatter her – the inevitable third-act redemption arc gets a little heavy-handed with its tending-a-garden metaphors and hyperbolic insistence that Martha’s appearance on The Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber was her phoenix-from-the-ashes moment. My ambivalence to the subject of this doc became earnest interest thanks to Cutler’s willingness to pry behind Martha’s carefully styled facade and bear the brunt of her annoyance. She flashes him glares and takes pregnant pauses during interview segments (she even refers him to the written materials she handed over in order to avoid one-on-one discussion of sensitive topics: “Take it from the letters,” she says curtly as Cutler prods her about her broken marriage). But the director does get her to say something that cracks Martha The Brand: “Imperfection is something I can deal with,” she says. That admission alone makes this spotty-but-watchable documentary a success.
Our Call: Martha is not perfect! But it’s an, um, satisfactory thing. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
