Of course Martha doesn’t like it, but the doco about her is compelling

Martha Stewart isn’t happy. Of course she isn’t. One thing that emerges with diamond-bright clarity from Martha (Netflix), R. J. Cutler’s profile of this extraordinary and divisive woman, is that she’s a perfectionist obsessively devoted to detail. So having someone else tell her story was bound to annoy her as she’d have undoubtedly done it differently, and, in her not-so-humble opinion, better.

Martha Stewart being interviewed for R.J. Cutler’s documentary.Credit: AP

So she was extremely forthcoming about her objections to the feature-length documentary when The New York Times called her for comment. Among her objections: unflattering camera angles were used for the interview with her. The scenes of her walking in her garden make her look like she’s a doddering old woman (she’s 83) when she was only limping because she was recovering from surgery on her Achilles tendon. She hates the music. There’s no mention of her grandchildren.

Trusting someone to tell your story, no matter who you are, could always be a tricky undertaking. How we see ourselves can be very different from the way someone else sees us, as can their ideas on what should be included or omitted in an account of our lives. Given the potential problems, one approach favoured by high-profile personalities is to employ the filmmaker and retain control over the process. No nasty surprises that way, but also probably a sanitised account that’s less probing and potentially less interesting. Yet given the appetite for such profiles – they’re a hot favourite on the streaming services, along with true crime – of a person of interest to a broad viewing public, and especially one trying to polish a tarnished image, it could be an attractive proposition.

The decision about how and when to embark on such a project is especially problematic for someone like Martha Stewart, with her stunning rise-and-fall story. She was widely recognised in the US as a domestic goddess long before Nigella Lawson served up her first gooey chocolate cake, and her domain extended beyond the kitchen to the whole house and garden. A by-no-means-exhaustive summary might describe her as one of eight children from a working-class Polish-American family in New Jersey who became a model, a stockbroker, a young wife and mother, and then a consummate hostess and caterer.

She subsequently built on her homemaking skills to become a corporate titan and billionaire, creating, driving and presiding over a multimedia empire that grew to encompass magazines, books, TV and radio, all firmly based on her style, taste and personality. Cutler’s profile persuasively proposes that she was the OG influencer.

Then, sensationally, she became a convicted criminal when a 2004 trial found her guilty of lying about why she sold her shares in a biotech company. She spent five months in prison and the stock price of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia plummeted. Following her release, the one-time beacon of all-American values became half of an unlikely odd couple when she teamed up with Snoop Dogg to host a cooking show, publish a cookbook and make TikToks.

So Martha’s is some story. And she allowed Cutler to tell it, or at least made herself available for an interview and approved access to her extensive property. And initially he would’ve seemed like a solid choice. An award-winning documentary maker with more than 50 films to his credit, he has a CV that includes Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, The September Issue and The World According to Dick Cheney. His history in the area stretches back three decades to his work on the Oscar-nominated The War Room (1993) with doco luminaries D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. So he’s no gun-for-hire producer trying to make his name in the sphere.

With Martha, he’s fashioned an intriguing, nuanced appreciation of a singular high-achiever. A person of relentless drive and ambition. A woman who values action and gets impatient with discussion of feelings and emotions. An exacting boss. A tall poppy who might’ve been a prize scalp for the FBI, a law-enforcement agency eager to demonstrate that it wasn’t letting the elites run wild in the wake of the Enron scandal.

On screen and in her books and magazines, Martha presented a quintessentially American image of domestic bliss. Blonde and pretty, she radiated cheerful can-do energy. And it seems appropriate to call her by her first name because her readers and viewers – count me in – felt as though we knew her, given that so much of her work focused on her homes, showcasing her kitchen, her renovation projects, her garden. She was like a capable friend who always had great advice on what to serve at a dinner party, how to decorate a child’s bedroom and what to plant in that problematic pocket of the garden.

But while Martha became a shining media star, she also divided people. She’s long been a lightning rod, sparking devotion and antagonism. In her view, as she explained to US TV host Charlie Rose in 1999, on the night her company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, “I was serving a desire ... to elevate the job of homemaker.” Martha’s belief was that what had traditionally been regarded as women’s work was undervalued. It was worthwhile, creative and rewarding, and it could be nourishing and beautiful, to the person who created it and for those around her. To quote from her famed sign-off, “It’s a good thing.”

In Martha’s world, there was always more to do: more jams and pies to make, more tables to decorate, more vegetables to plant. However, her critics saw her as creating a tastefully gilded cage for her followers, a honey trap with the home as an insatiable maw, the site of never-ending tasks and standards that were impossible to achieve.

And, perhaps inevitably, along with spectacular success powered by all that sunny energy came revelations of a darker side: of a demanding, even bullying boss prone to angry outbursts and intolerant of what she saw as slackness or imperfection. Cutler captures this aspect in a couple of succinctly telling scenes. In one, she scolds an assistant for using the wrong knife to cut an orange, judging their work to be thoughtless and inefficient. In another, she objects to the inclusion of a teacup in her homewares line as the handle doesn’t comfortably allow sufficient space for fingers. She grumpily notes that it wouldn’t have got through quality control if she had been running the show. In both cases, she’s impatient, irritated and probably right.

Martha’s story is fascinating. A pioneer whose frontier was the domestic space. America’s first female self-made billionaire. A corporate colossus who suffered an ignominious fall from grace and was perhaps targeted precisely because she stood out so sharply from the largely male pack around her.

Cutler conveys all of this in his profile, and whatever objections Martha might have, it’s compelling viewing.

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