‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler’s Splendid Documentary Taps Into Everything We Love, and Don’t, About Martha Stewart
By Owen Gleiberman
October 30, 2024
“Martha,” R.J. Cutler’s film about the life and career of Martha Stewart (it drops today on Netflix), is a splendid documentary. It’s a movie that captures how Martha Stewart’s penetration into American culture seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it was unlikely. It traces how she started off as a model, then became a New York stockbroker, then moved with her publishing-magnate husband to Westport, Conn., where they bought a fixer-upper, Turkey Hill Farm, whose fixing up, by Martha (she hand-painted the entire farmhouse while listening to the Watergate hearings), became the prototype for her brand of obsessively tasteful rustic “perfection.” It shows us how she launched a prestige catering business and then, with the 1982 book “Entertaining,” launched herself as the doyenne of a new upscale lifestyle culture that would be — in a word — vicarious.
The movie shows us that Stewart had a vision, and that her creative genius at shabby-chic retro design and intricate but insistently “user-friendly” recipes was matched by her business acumen, which turned her into the first self-made woman billionaire in America. The film then shows us how her empire came apart when she was accused of insider trading, a controversial case (some think she was targeted just for being who she was) that resulted in her spending five months in prison. And it captures how, against the odds, she came back in the social-media era, remaking herself as a down-with-the-kids, down-with-Snoop Dogg icon of ageless cool.
She did all this, of course, by marketing the Martha personality: the self-empowered WASP goddess, direct and imperious, with an eerily serene grin of beatific power. She was a woman who glowed, who peered at the world through an upscale glaze. In a New Yorker essay by Joan Didion that’s quoted in the film, Didion makes the point that Stewart wasn’t just a superwoman. She was Everywoman — that is, she made herself into a mythological image of the roles that women had been raised to occupy, then merged that with a self-empowerment that transcended those roles. She literally had her (gorgeous) (designer) (made from scratch!) cake and ate it too. But there was a dark side to this Wonder Woman saga. How could there not be?
“Martha” tells a transfixing story, and part of what makes the film so compelling is the way Cutler spins Stewart’s biography into a meditation on The Meaning of Martha. The film hails her as “the first influencer,” and that feels right if you add that the world of “influencing” is essentially a sponsor-driven grand illusion. It certainly was for Stewart, who created and marketed the idea of a high-powered homemaker for women who no longer wanted to be homemakers. The world of Martha Stewart Living — not just the magazine but the ethos, the whole style of Martha Stewart living — was grounded but virtual. For really, who could do it? Who could manage to do even a little bit of it? The first extended clip we see is of the young Martha, back when she looked like a flaxen-haired Emma Thompson as the American country version of a British royal wannabe, talking about encasing a turkey in puff pastry for Thanksgiving — and then we see the turkey, which looks like a sculpture of baked dough carved with hieroglyphics.
The key word in all this is “aspirational.” That was Martha’s calling — to show you all the good things you could aspire to. She laid down an aesthetic, and it’s one that spoke to a lot of us. But is aspiration, in that sense, always such a good thing? Obviously, in a great many ways, to have aspirations — for your life, career, family, home, you name it — is healthy and human. But the aspirational culture of the 21st century tends to mean a certain unattainable proxy dream thing. (Two fifths of 20-year-olds today say they’re planning to be “stars.”) Martha Stewart was a progenitor of that. In a certain way, she put a turkey in puff pastry so that you didn’t have to (but could dream about it as if you were the one who’d done it). She turned “homemaking” into a so-real-you-could-touch-it-and-taste-it hologram.
She was the first celebrity designer to hawk her wares in K-Mart, which turned out to be a stroke of late-capitalist inspiration. It spoke to a certain element of democratization in her empire. At the same time, we hear an off-camera voice in the documentary say, “She wanted to make it possible for people to have the homes and surroundings that they wanted, whether you have money or not.” Well, it takes money to have those homes and trappings and surroundings — but to the extent that Stewart might say, “Actually, it just takes time and devotion,” guess what? Time is money too. She was selling a fantasy of elitism to the elite.
Stewart, now a robust 83, is interviewed throughout the film by Cutler, and she’s immensely likable: a fountain of fearless opinions and I-did-it-my-way charisma. Yet she’s caught in some revealing moments. Her marriage, to Andrew Stewart, lasted for close to 30 years, until it crashed onto the shoals of his philandering. But Cutler asks Stewart about an affair she may have had before her husband strayed — and after squirming on camera, she owns up to it but waves it away and basically says: That was nothing, it didn’t count. Stewart is a vivid narrator of her own story, but she cuts corners. When Cutler asks her what she most dislikes, along with a list of reasonable things (waste, inefficiency, avoidance, impatience) she says, “I dislike people who think they can do more than they can do.” Hello? That’s her entire demographic. Her offscreen personality, which we get to see in a few clips, was so stern and controlling it’s as if her addiction to perfection had become a form of OCD.
It’s possible to like and dislike Martha Stewart at the same time, and for a lot of us that duality has long seemed the sanest reaction to her. She was selling something unattainable and pretending it was real. In a sense, she sold superiority: her superiority to you, your superiority to others if you followed her. Yet she did it with such style and beauty she could make everyday life seem breathtaking. She made you believe in the illusion.
The mirage of her brand came tumbling down, of course, when she was accused of insider trading, after she’d dumped shares of ImClone stock on the same day that the company’s owner, Sam Waksal (a friend of hers), and his family members did. Waksal had been tipped that the FDA was not going to approve his wonder drug. It seems like a clean-cut case, but Stewart insisted that she never spoke to Waksal — that she simply had a brief conversation with her broker, who recommended that she sell. And what was strange about the case is that she wasn’t technically charged with insider trading. She was charged, by no less a figure than James Comey (then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York), with lying to the authorities. Which kind of amounted to the same thing.
“Martha” more or less embraces the idea that Stewart was martyred for being a rich powerful woman. And there’s no doubt that the graceless, smirking way she was treated in the media supports that. She was dragged through the mud in a case of collective media schadenfreude. The actual legal case? I think she was treated in much the same way that non-famous people are. The documentary, using illustrations, takes us through the diary of her incarceration at the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia (a minimum-security facility that had a reputation for being “Camp Cupcake,” but was rougher than that). It turns those 150 days into Martha’s Stations of the Cross. She was hurt, yes, but she was humbled. The armor of her pride was torn away, and she allowed herself to grow from the experience.
The movie then invites us to revel in her supremely ironic moment of triumphant comeback. Her company’s stock price had plunged in the wake of the scandal; her time at the center of the culture was over. How could Martha Stewart reinvent herself? On March 30, 2015, she appeared as one of the roasters on “The Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber,” and she killed. She spoke the language of the new America — shameless, vulgar, merciless — but she did it through that WASP glaze. It was brilliant. It opened the door to her collaboration with Snoop Dogg, and to her penetration of a different audience: the (young) influencers she’d been such a force in inventing. She was now the O.G. of taste, one who’d found a place in the new world. By the end of “Martha,” you’ll likely agree that that’s a good thing.
