‘Martha’ review: A Martha Stewart documentary is most compelling when the queen of composure is at her most uncomfortable
Whether it’s performative or genuine, Martha Stewart seems unable to bluff her way through discomfort. In “Martha,” R.J. Cutler’s documentary for Netflix about the lifestyle entrepreneur, media personality and queen of composure, all kinds of small but interesting things are happening when the filmmaker asks about certain biographical details she’d rather pretend didn’t exist. Those can be quietly riveting moments. But otherwise the documentary — particularly as it pertains to her life in the last 20 years, post-prison — comes across as a high-end marketing reel.
That’s the usual pitfall of celebrity documentaries that involve the subject’s participation. They exist to burnish an image. Can something worthwhile and revealing be made within those confines? Usually not. “Martha” occasionally proves otherwise because Stewart resists vulnerability at every turn. But her ego prevents her from shutting down altogether. She wants to be seen, but not really. It’s a fascinating tension. No surprise, she’s reportedly unhappy with the documentary’s end result.
Raised in New Jersey, Stewart is the second of six children. She had much in common with her father and the way she describes him is revealing: “He was a perfectionist and got the job done that he set out to do.” Not in a professional capacity, she clarifies. That’s where they diverged: “He was a failure in work. He could have done pretty much anything he wanted, but he was stuck in a salesman’s job.” Everything she says next is detached, as if it had no effect on her or anyone else: Sometimes, she says, her father started the day off with a “large glass of coffee and red wine. So, is that an alcoholic? Maybe. But he never looked like a drunk, he never stumbled around and threw things and broke things. That wasn’t my father. But he was a dissatisfied, unhappy human being.”
He was a taskmaster. He could also be mean. Maybe they shared those qualities in common, as well. The family grew their own food because money was tight and that formative experience nurtured Stewart’s love for gardening. One of her brothers had a different response: “To this day, I despise gardening.”
There’s so much subtext to be read between those two perspectives.
I wish Cutler had more insights about Stewart’s fetish for perfection. It can often be driven by a need to assert control over an uncontrollable world, and someone here says as much — “Whatever Martha can control is going to come out fine, it’s what she can’t control that’s going to drive her crazy” — but Cutler isn’t able to get her talking about the root of some of those neuroses.
Her longtime marriage to Andrew Stewart, who she wed at 19, was not a happy one (they would divorce in 1990 after nearly 30 years together). Nor did she warm to being a mother (the couple shares a daughter, Alexis). Is it ironic that she built an empire premised on the fantasy of the perfect home? The perfect hostess? Maybe somewhere in her subconscious she decided that if she got all the outward stuff just right, it would be enough to hoist her over all the emotional walls she had erected and finally make her own life resemble the fantasy she was peddling.
She talks about her husband’s infidelities but gives little importance to her own, which somehow doesn’t strike her as an imperfection. I recently came across a quotation from the author and psychologist Thema Bryant that seemed fitting to Stewart: “When we struggle with perfectionism, we prioritize our performance and productivity to the neglect of our inner lives.”
Stewart seems to understand this to a certain extent. “Have you had any relationships where you talk about your feelings?” Cutler asks. No, she says. “And that’s probably why I haven’t had very many personal relationships with men, for example, because I couldn’t care less. It doesn’t interest me so much to know, ‘Oh Charles, how do you feel at this second?’ I don’t care, actually.”
Charles was her longtime boyfriend Charles Simonyi, the wealthy software engineer who helped build Microsoft Office. They were a couple at her professional height, when federal prosecutors alleged she and her broker relied on inside information to make a stock trade. She was ultimately convicted in 2004 of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators. During her five-month incarceration, Simonyi visited her just once. “That was distressing to me,” she tells Cutler. She kept a journal during that time and one sentence hits you in the gut: “I feel very inconsequential today, as if no one would miss me if I never came back to reality.”
If you don’t share intimacies and form emotional connections with people — if you don’t care about their feelings, as Stewart admits — maybe, like Simonyi, they won’t be there for you in your lowest moments. But that aforementioned diary entry suggests that when she’s being most honest with herself, she really does want closer, deeper bonds. Simonyi would ultimately leave the relationship to be with someone else.
Stewart has a lot of appealing qualities that come through. She’s smart and funny and she knows what she’s talking about. But you also understand what turns people off. She has a tremendous self-regard that can be absurd at times. And though I generally dislike the idea of tone policing, so many of Stewart’s issues stem from a nasty tone. It’s one thing to speak to employees frankly. It’s another when that becomes demeaning and cruel. A glimpse of this is captured on film when a camera crew followed her while preparing an Easter brunch shortly before her prison sentence was to begin.
Various people interviewed for the documentary defend her behavior, pointing to a double standard: When a man does it, he’s being assertive. When Stewart does it … well, let the name-calling commence. Cutler doesn’t push back on this, which is a mistake, because it’s a phony debate. No employer should eviscerate their workers and it’s paternalistic and chauvinistic even when women do it. You can be an effective boss without being an ogre.
There are other hypocrisies I wish Cutler would have examined. In Stewart’s prison diary, she writes about her concerns with the “very poor quality of the food and the unavailability of fresh anything.” Has she spent any time in the last two decades advocating for improved conditions for incarcerated people? The film doesn’t bother asking.
According to a CBS report from 2005, during her time in prison, “she took on prison reform and the humane treatment of inmates as a personal cause. And what has really worked for her is that she seems sincere about it. Nobody will be shocked if she continues to work to improve prison conditions after she’s released.” But it’s not apparent that Stewart has done anything about the issue since.
Her career took a hit after her conviction and you can understand how personally devastating this was. But the faint suggestion that she was a victim rings false; her company would ultimately sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. This is where the documentary loses steam in its final 20 minutes, relying extensively on clips from a Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber she participated in. Her self-deprecating jokes are fine but not especially funny, even if the documentary presents her performance as a moment of triumph.
After that roast, “the culture found her again,” someone opines, but Stewart has little to say about this evolution or, yes, how she feels about it.
Perfectionism, the psychologist Bryant writes, can emerge from “the need to be independent very early in our lives because our parents may have struggled financially, physically, or emotionally.” Maybe some of that speaks to Stewart’s formative years. But her imperfections — including her inability to accept them — are what make her most interesting.
“Martha” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
Where to watch: Netflix
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.