Netflix’s New Martha Stewart Documentary Renders Her More Powerful Than Ever

Martha. Photo: Martha Stewart/Netflix

When Martha Stewart eventually passes away, she should order that director R.J. Cutler also be buried along with her inside her death pyramid. With the new Netflix documentary, Martha, he has constructed the greatest possible tribute one could want for a figure as godlike as Stewart — a warts-and-all portrait of the lifestyle mogul that somehow still manages to be a hagiography. Although she clearly cooperated with the production, Stewart has reportedly criticized Cutler’s finished film, which is understandable. In Martha, she comes off as combative, egomaniacal, impatient, uncaring, and at times delusional, as well as a wronged visionary who has reemerged on top. And not just merely “on top”: As someone says early in the film, Martha Stewart essentially created the world we’re currently living in — a world of influencers and borrowed lifestyles and perfect surfaces, all while deep beneath us roll the storms of chaos. Is Martha a good movie? I’m not sure. But it might be an essential one. Anyway, into the pyramid you go, R.J. Cutler.

Formally, the film is no great shakes. It’s an amiably edited journey through Stewart’s life and career with plenty of archival footage, synopsizing her early years in Nutley, New Jersey, with an abusive, embittered father who made the family raise their own vegetables; her young marriage to law student and future publishing-house chief Andy Stewart; the couple’s move to a Westport, Connecticut, fixer-upper that she transformed into a tony manse; and the discovery of her catering and entertaining talents after her lavish dinner parties. Like so many streaming-era documentaries, the picture effectively opens with a trailer for itself, briefly previewing its main points before settling into a by-now familiar cadence of bland insights, light historical context, and obvious music cues. (When young Martha Kostyra takes up modeling, we hear Etta James sing “Good Lookin’” on the soundtrack. When she becomes a stockbroker, we hear Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” When her career as a lifestyle guru takes off, we hear the synth beats of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough.”)

What makes Martha fascinating is the now-83-year-old Stewart herself, who presides over the film with a contemporary onscreen interview. (Other interviewees — including family members, friends, employees, and inmates she did time with at Alderson Federal Prison — remain offscreen as they attest, choruslike, to her gumption, her drive, and, occasionally, her goodness.) She makes a hard-nosed guide to her own life, pushing back when Cutler presses her on tougher topics. When Stewart talks angrily about how Andy cheated on her, Cutler notes that she also cheated on him. Her answer? “Yeah, but Andy never knew about that.” When Cutler replies that Andy did in fact know, Martha dismisses her own affairs as minor dalliances. This sort of back-and-forth actually helps humanize Stewart, however much she may hate it in retrospect. And it lifts Martha the movie up from just another bit of swoony celebrity blather to something more interesting.

Stewart’s surface perfection powered her business. She created beautiful spaces with beautiful things and cooked beautiful dishes, all while still looking beautiful. As the film makes clear, she connected with a generation of women who had been raised by working mothers; many of them didn’t get homemaking knowledge or recipes passed down. Stewart filled that gap, and she did so without requiring any kind of emotional reciprocity. She was there, smiling and infallible, the MacGyver of good housekeeping, ready to turn a used glass jug and some tissues into an elegant centerpiece at the drop of a hat. An incredible amount of initiative and energy went into all this, but she made it look so effortless partly because she had taste.

When Stewart did fall from grace, however, the celebrity culture that had embraced and lionized her bit back. She had always seemed so unfazed by everything, so the world now delighted in seeing her brought down several pegs. The infamous insider-trading scandal that landed her in prison is still a raw subject; Stewart and others involved continue to claim she did nothing illegal, and that she became a target because then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York James Comey wanted to make a name for himself by bagging a celebrity. Stewart was also genuinely changed by prison and made friendships there among the women incarcerated alongside her. Once her mask of perfection fell, she seemed to open herself up more to the world.

All this would make an ideal rise-fall-rise narrative for a standard documentary, and you can imagine what the pitch memo for this might have looked like: Watch Martha Stewart achieve success, then watch the world unfairly humiliate her, then watch her claw her way back to fame and relevance. And maybe Martha still thinks it is that kind of movie. But Cutler’s onscreen interactions with Stewart, as well as occasional forays into the way she treats the people around her, turn the picture into something a lot slippier and the subject into someone more captivating. While most films would crystallize their theses as they near their end, Martha invites ambiguity and uncertainty. The more we see of Stewart, the more we feel for her — and the less we understand her. She cannot be summarized. And as much as Martha might try, in its failure to do so lies its unlikely power.