MARTHA (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Martha, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 29, 2024

There's a lot to admire about Martha Stewart, who made a business and cultural empire out of nothing. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, her name became synonymous with homemaking and housekeeping, but her brand of domestic upkeep didn't seem to carry the societal expectations for women of the 1950s, in which it was "a woman's place" to do those things. Stewart gave off an air of independence. If she was going to cook meals and decorate her home, it wasn't because of what some man or group of men said she should do. It was because she wanted to do it—maybe even needed to do so.

If it is a need for Stewart, from where does it come? Director R.J. Cutler's Martha begins to head down this line of examination, as the filmmaker sits down with Stewart in a one-on-one interview that sometimes feels like an interrogation. She's probably used to that tone of questioning at this point, and that's not a dig at the legal troubles that basically destroyed her public persona and business in the first decades of the 2000s. Those comments and jokes have been made and done to death by this point.

No, Stewart's independence was always met with some skepticism. On one side, there were those who wondered if she was really being the model of an independent woman by focusing so much on homemaking. On the other, there were those who met her success with the usual sexism of seeing a woman excel in business. There was almost no way Stewart could win, but somehow, she did—for a while, at least.

Her existence, then, is something of a contradiction, and recognizing that is the early strength of Cutler's documentary. She put herself forward as one with a "perfectly perfect" life, but behind the scenes, there was little that was perfect about her private affairs, which became quite public as fame arrived.

Stewart gave an impression of being able to keep everything in order, but rumors and accusations swirled around the chaos of working for her. Yes, the discussion of her legal woes is unavoidable, which is why Cutler devotes a lengthy segment of the movie to them, but it was yet another contradiction—that the epitome of looking perfect and doing everything right ended up incarcerated for five months.

Initially, Cutler's approach to both the interview and the movie itself comes across as curious and occasionally critical of Stewart. He knows where to draw the line, of course, as he asks about marital infidelities—on the part of both parties in Stewart's first and only marriage—and her conduct as an employer, for example. How often, though, does Stewart step in to draw that line during the interview? It's quite a bit in both subtle and direct ways, as she dismisses suggestions of hypocrisy or flat-out tells the filmmaker that they should change the topic of conversation.

Such moments tell us about Stewart, too, and the fact that Cutler retains them here means the movie doesn't entirely come across as a puff piece. That tone and approach are for later in the documentary, especially as the narrative arrives at her legal battle, her incarceration, the fall of her business, and her unexpected comeback to the spotlight in the past decade.

Until that point, though, the movie, while taking the traditional route of a biographical documentary, does seem genuinely inspective of what makes Stewart tick and why her life wasn't quite the one suggested by her public persona. We get the usual, chronological narrative, beginning with her childhood in New Jersey, but it's vital, perhaps, to understanding Stewart's general attitude. She was raised by a mother who did concentrate on and teach her daughter matters of domesticity, and her father was a rough perfectionist—abusive, in fact, when his children didn't do things exactly as he wanted. There wasn't much affection in the house, and Stewart recognizes that as why she doesn't particularly care about what or how people are feeling.

She would rather talk about what they're doing, and more than that, she'd much rather be doing something. She started working as a model, went to college, worked on Wall Street, began a local catering business after moving to small-town Connecticut, and wrote a book on entertaining guests, which was so popular that it started her career as an author, a TV personality, a magazine publisher, and a media mogul.

Stewart was also married and had a daughter during that time, but since the course of the marriage has already been suggested, it's only worth mentioning at this point how contentious she still is about her ex-husband, his affairs, and his assertion that he only strayed because, according to him, Stewart did so first. The way she talks around that is illuminating, and her shutting down the topic immediately after might be more so.

Stewart says a lot by evading. It's fascinating to watch, even as we do admire how much she accomplished from starting with so little. Martha, though, gradually falls into the trap of wanting to make us appreciate its subject by emphasizing those accomplishments and diminishing the critiques—even those Stewart makes of herself or somewhat confirms in other ways here. By the end, the movie isn't simply telling Stewart's story. It's telling us exactly what we should think of that story.

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