There are plenty of voices in R.J. Cutler’s “Martha,” the documentarian’s latest fascinating look at a cultural icon (in this case, the “original influencer” Martha Stewart), but there is only one talking head who we actually see seated for an interview. Stewart, of course, who seems eager to tell her story — until she’s not — with Cutler smartly refusing to cut away when the wildly successful entrepreneur and convicted felon (Stewart is nothing if not complex) begins to balk, to noticeably grimace, at a line of questioning. Mostly, it seems like things are simply black and white to Stewart, except — of course — some of the finer details of her own life.
As Cutler holds on Stewart, she has to break the silence, giving just a smidge more away with each passing word. Consider a moment in the film‘s first act, as Stewart begins to unpack what led to the dissolution of her marriage to college sweetheart Andy Stewart: a defiant and clearly still very angry Martha initially offers some advice for the women out there, telling them if their husbands step out on them, leave them, full stop, and always regard them as the “piece of shit” they are. But, Cutler implores, didn’t Martha cheat on Andy before he cheated on her? No!, Martha says. But Andy told the director that. Well, Martha shakes it off, that was different. Was it really? To Stewart, it was.
It’s an instructive moment, teasing the ways in which Stewart sees the world and her place within it: there are her rules, and then there are the rules she can break. If nothing else, audience members will walk away from “Martha” with a far greater understanding of Stewart — of all the “good things,” in her parlance, and plenty of the bad — and equal admiration and unease of what that all adds up to.
Stewart is clearly a genius, and “Martha” makes that plain, showing off her business acumen at every stage along the way. It wasn’t just her ideas around what her brand could be (heck, what a “brand” in general could be!) or her savvy take on the marketplace (her choice to take her wares to K-Mart was met with both derision and then big, big bucks) that made her stand out, that made her America’s first self-made female billionaire. She was also, as some of those unseen talking heads tell us, “a great white shark,” “a bitch,” and someone who would have been viewed far more favorably, had she been a man.
But she’s Martha. And in this world, her spin on being “perfectly perfect” was both rewarded and damned. Cutler’s challenge? Selling that complexity with an even hand. Despite only showing Stewart in the hot seat, Cutler and his team have assembled a wide swath of other talking heads (well, talking voices) to round out her story. Many of them, unsurprisingly enough, see some of her greatest joy and deepest tragedies in different terms that Stewart does. Early on, Stewart walks us through her childhood, punctuated by a tough-talking father who taught the kids how to garden (mostly, they needed to grow their own food, because as ambitious as the guy was, he wasn’t very good at his actual job), a memory Stewart looks back on fondly and her siblings all remember as being nearly abusive. This dichotomy sets the stage for what’s to come.
The film is loosely divided into two parts, one taking us through Stewart’s early life, education, marriage, divorce, and tremendous professional success, the other following her through the 2004 trial that sent her to prison for five months and everything that happened after that. The split is canny one — there was definitely a “before” Martha and an “after” one — but both could easily be expanded, even doubled. Cutler’s film begins to peter out in its final moments (the forging of Stewart’s highly unexpected bond with Snoop Dogg could foster its own film), but the trip there is certainly fascinating. It’s a good thing.
Grade: B
“Martha” premiered at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. Netflix will release it at a later date.
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