"Martha" presents a side of Martha Stewart we haven't seen before: hers, in her voice
By Melanie McFarland
October 30, 2024
Martha Stewart is not big on sharing her feelings. To the millions who greedily gobbled up scuttlebutt about her legendary meanness over the years, this is far from a news flash. And it might have proven an obstacle for some documentary filmmakers.
That knowledge explains why R.J. Cutler opens “Martha” by asking Stewart what she most dislikes. “That’s a hard question to answer,” Stewart says in her signature monotone, the voice she uses when she’s not selling you something. Her long list includes waste, inefficiency, avoidance and impatience—the knowns (“I dislike not paying attention to details”), on-brand unknowns (“I dislike aprons and housedresses”), and some opinions about color the filmmaker leaves unexplained.
They hang out in the silence that follows, along with the shot lingering on Stewart’s face taking in her reaction to space that isn’t being filled with conversation or a question. Stewart lets that be for a beat, then smirks in a way best described as not unpleasant. “OK,” she says curtly. “Next.”
Eventually, we get why Cutler provokes her this way. Stewart spent most of her life building a façade of impenetrability and invulnerability, controlling and crafting an image of calm, assured expertise. Emotions are messy.
Martha Stewart, the brand and the person, is graceful and ordered, like the gardens that give her life purpose. Her dislikes are weeds that matter less, if at all, than what she prizes. She treats the question as compulsory but perhaps inessential. Soon enough we understand its role in deciphering the woman sitting before us, centered in an opulent room with a lush bouquet of stargazer lilies behind her.
Throughout “Martha,” Stewart colors her words with effervescent agreeability, only to betray flashes of discomfort when the silence stretches beyond a second or two that are much more telling. What registers on her face as she lists each disliked item is a baseline, a Rosetta Stone. That exchange readies us to look closely at what she doesn’t say or refuses to put into words, the details that make “Martha” genuinely affecting and honest.
“Some people revel in this self-pity, et cetera, et cetera. I just don’t,” Stewart says when she arrives at the chapter of her story requiring her to describe her marriage’s failure during her publicity tour to launch her book “Weddings.”
"I handed over letters that were very personal,” she said. “So guess what? Take it out of the letters.”
Yes, Martha wrote down her life’s recipe and opened those journals and papers to Cutler and us. This is all part of Stewart’s guidance in how she’s presented. Cybill Shepherd may have portrayed her woes in a pair of made-for-TV movies, but the actual dialogue of Stewart's heartbreak is incomparable.
“I have to go San Francisco and talk about ‘Weddings’ and my wonderful life,” reads a line from one of Stewart’s letters to her increasingly distant husband. “I hope you are enjoying your freedom. And I hope my plane crashes.”
Taking in “Martha” is as soothing as thumbing through the glossy pages of Living, with its parade of touched-up artfully arranged photographs interspersed with archival footage and illustrations serving as tasteful alternatives to reenactments. This realizes what Joan Didion describes in her 2000 New Yorker essay about the “unusual bonding” and “proprietary intimacy” Stewart creates with us — her people, her consumers, her devourers.
“Martha” features a galaxy of voices we haven’t heard before, including brothers and a sister who offer insight into the hardships of their homelife when they were children. Cutler isn’t one for overt psychoanalysis, but the choice to sprout the narrative in Edward Kostyra’s iron-fisted influence as opposed to featuring Stewart’s mother, a beloved recurring guest on her syndicated daytime show, is eye-opening. Father was demanding – “mean, mean,” is all Stewart offers.
Her gardening fixation comes from him making his children plant food so the family could eat. The juxtaposition of scenes of her surveying her estate’s grounds and telling her landscaping staff what she wants to be done against the echo of her brother Eric Scott’s voice saying “To this day, I despise gardening” is withering.
Among the background figures in her purported one-woman show, however, he casts the longest shadow – a fascinating bit of embroidery on what is essentially the story of America’s relationship with womanhood. We love second chances, constant innovators, and people who would rather be rich than liked.
That last one, though, hints at the darker side of our love affairs with celebrities, especially women, in the way we celebrate loudly when the highest flyers tumble from the sky. Stewart may be worth $400 million now, but her conviction on charges related to an insider trading scandal lost her more than an estimated billion dollars.
She’s since been exonerated in the court of public opinion, but Stewart hasn’t forgiven the men who used her conviction to further their political careers, including James Comey. (“Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high,” she snaps.)
But if this is the most exposed Stewart allows herself to be, then we must also accept that the only current interview footage about Stewart features her and only her. Martha Stewart doesn't do warts, but Cutler edits a wry irony into the artful coverage she dabs on her blemishes, like her refusal to count her marital infidelity as equivalent to that of her husband. We may laugh at Stewart's brazen hypocrisy because, as we should know by now, Stewart defines the world as she sees it.
Stewart’s influence has been celebrated and scrutinized since she rose to national prominence on the strength of her first bestseller, “Entertaining.” Her climb from lifestyle author to homemaking empress, along with her fall and brief imprisonment, spawned endless special reports, gossip columns, parodies, and unauthorized biographies both serious and salacious.
CNN’s four-part series “The Many Lives of Martha Stewart,” which aired in January, is probably the most comprehensive and evenhanded dissection of Stewart’s life and career to date that doesn’t include her voice. Students of all things Stewart may find it illuminating to watch or rewatch it in tandem with taking in “Martha," since Cutler finds what the most extensively researched and sourced always miss: her humanity.
Stewart makes no bones about her perfectionism or her lack of warmth, which she freely surmises is the reason her closest relationships suffered. The illusion of building her empire brick-by-brick on her own is core to the Martha Stewart mystique and legend and a prime annoyance among many of those who worked with her, and whose contributions went uncredited.
Off-screen voices from Stewart's inner circle include Snoop, (naturally); Martha Stewart Living’s Founding editor-in-chief Isolde Motley; Andy Monness, who worked with Stewart in her pre-catering days on Wall Street and other close friends. Several are kind and blisteringly honest about who she is. One offers, “She got such wrong ideas about success.” Another describes her with an expletive that rhymes with “itch.”
They contextualize her personality but don’t speak for her even when she can’t or won’t weigh in on the most compelling reveals Cutler shows us, which is a palpable loneliness and pain.
In describing her romantic relationships, Stewart admits, “It doesn’t interest me so much to know, ‘Oh Charles, how do you feel this second?' I don’t care, actually,” she says. “I do care about, ‘Charles, what are you doing? What are you thinking about?’ So I sort of gravitate towards people who are doing things all the time.”
“Martha” sheds a bleaker light on Martha’s frayed relationship with her daughter Alexis, which was so widely known at one point that Stewart put her in a “Mystery Science Theater 3000"-style spinoff called “Whatever, Martha” to snark about her mother’s unrelenting pursuit of perfection and ambition.
We have been privy to a heavier sorrow in their story that reveals much about what women of Stewart’s era were expected to do and what her refusal to be limited to those restrictions cost her.
“What is more important, a marriage or a career?” she asks. You tell me, her inquisitor throws back at her, and she concludes somewhat hollowly, “I don’t know.”
Whenever “Martha” captures these moments of introspection we see its eponymous figure exposed for what she is – ambitious and demanding, forward-thinking and innovative, brusque and task-obsessed. Easily discomfited when danced into corners from which the only escape is introspection. Built to charge ahead, not look back or inward.
Stewart frequently describes herself as a teacher. Through “Martha” Cutler becomes an instructor of sorts as well, tracing the crisp angles, lines, and blurred edges she designed into her life. Whether those are necessary ingredients in the bittersweet romance an ambitious woman cultivates with herself is debatable. Layered on top of everything else we’ve read and watched, it’s the piece that at last helps us understand Stewart in her fullness.
"Martha" is currently streaming on Netflix.
