At her zenith, Martha Stewart could come off as insufferable, an icy perfectionist who’d never let a hair seem out of place or a place setting pass that didn’t have hand-made touches.
But even her haters had a hunch she got a raw deal from the Bush II Justice Dept., busted and imprisoned for “insider trading,” which she didn’t do, but prosecuted and persecuted by a showboating spotlight hound prosecutor Hillary Clinton could tell you all about.
The average person reading her magazine, watching her TV show and and experiencing her “brand” — perfectionism — showing off her meticuloulsy-kept home in The Hamptons “makes you feel like a failure,” an observer notes.
Yet give the “original” influencer her due. She made the idea that “everyday women” can “bring beauty into their homes” with a little tutelage, encouragement and something Stewart always seems to have — “time” — not just “aspirational” and “marketable,” but approachable and doable.
Yes, she was born beautiful. She long ago lost any grounding sense of self-awareness. But the privilege, dismissive bossiness and curtness that most in her orbit or passing through it experienced? She held herself to higher standards and wasn’t easy on those who didn’t share that.
Stewart didn’t just marry money. She earned fortunes and maybe she lorded it over doubters. And when the “worst possible thing happened,” she took the heat, did the time and staged a late-life third-act “comeback” worthy of Betty White.
A new documentary about her does a decent job of letting us think that’s “a good thing,”
Emmy-winning documentary producer and director R.J. Cutler (“The September Issue,” “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry”) gets at the many different phases and faces of “Martha” in his new documentary for Netflix. He even gets under her skin at times as her focuses on her foibles, failed marriages and blinkered hypocrisy.
But I have to say, Stewart comes out of it as more likable than most anyone would expect. When she sat down with her pal-in-privilege Barbara Walters for an early 2000s interview as her empire crumbled thanks to that schadenfreude-filled feeding-frenzy, Stewart isn’t even the most insufferable woman in that two-shot.
She shares stories of her less-than-posh Nutley, New Jersey childhood, crediting a father who didn’t show her much that wasn’t disdain with teaching her and her five siblings to garden and a mother who wasn’t all that affectionate herself for teaching young Martha Kostyra to cook.
We get frank discussions of her ideas of “love” and “fidelity,” and a taste of her West Virginia prison diary, what she did with her time when forced to give up micromanaging for five months.
Cutler’s shooting strategy here has every sibling, employee, friend and “ex-friend” who speaks about Stewart heard on tape, not seen interviewed on camera. That’s reserved for Herself. Production-savvy Stewart shows impatience with some of the questions, lines of questioning and testily offers her “solution” for the tedium of that.
“Take it out of the letters,” she snaps, as she’d given Cutler unprecedented access to her story and her archives, including letters to her ex, etc.
Cutler uses interviews, family photos and “modeling” shots from her youth and decades and decades of footage of her decades on TV, including unflattering outtakes, as well as painted recreations of the dismissals of her “Martha Stewart Living” magazine pitch, her prosecution and trial to create this just-intimate-enough portrait.
And as the warts and all image emerges, with her surgically-polished profile never breaking a sweat, we still can’t help but get a kick out of her Bieber-Snoop fed revival. Because as much as her comeuppance seemed destined, that “comeback” makes her story as American as they come.
Rating: R, profanity, a little skin
Cast: Martha Stewart, archival footage of Barbara Walters, David Letterman, etc., and the voices of Snoop Dogg, Alexis Stewart, many others
Credits: Directed by R.J. Cutler. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:55
