If the money shot in a documentary comes when the subject gets so honest and personal that they begin to cry, director R.J. Cutler was in trouble when he began work on his Martha Stewart doc, “Martha.” That’s because his subject doesn’t show much inclination to get honest and personal, much less emotional.
That made things difficult for Cutler, the director of “The September Issue” and “The War Room,” who is also on the festival circuit this fall with “Elton John: Never Too Late.” The filmmaker is trying to craft a film about the rise, fall and redemption of an iconic American lifestyle maven, but finds that icon reluctant to play along with the fall and redemption parts of that storyline. Time and again, Stewart clams up or shuts down when she’d prodded on sensitive subjects; you get the feeling she’s humoring her filmographer with only slightly more restraint than she might show to a kitchen helper who uses the wrong knife to cut an orange.
But he sticks with it to the betterment of the Netflix movie which had its world premiere on Saturday at the Telluride Film Festival with Stewart in attendance. “Martha” begins with the kind of laudatory montage designed to prove that its subject is worthy of a bio-doc, but it doesn’t take long for the praise (“if there was ever an original influencer, it’s Martha” … “she created the world we’re living in”) turns edgier as it mentions phrases like homemaker porn and suggests Stewart “bought into the ideal of perfection — at what cost?”
But before “Martha” explores the cost, it charts the rise of Stewart’s empire with brisk efficiency. Alternating on-camera interviews with a composed Martha with voiceover comments from an array of friends, family members and experts — all of it visually conveyed with the usual array of old photos, archival footage and occasional illustrations from Guy Shield — it lays out the story of a young woman whose father was a tough perfectionist who had six kids but no money, and who started each day with a large glass of coffee and red wine.
She became a successful model at age 15 and fell in love with the first man she slept with (“he was very aggressive, and I liked it”). But when she told her father they were getting married, he slapped her across the face and said, “No, you’re not going to get married to that guy. He’s a Jew.”
She married him anyway and had a baby, because that’s what everybody was doing, only to discover that motherhood didn’t come naturally to her. So she went to work on Wall Street, bought an old, run-down house on Turkey Hill Road in Westport, Connecticut, redid the house herself and found a new calling as a multimedia home and lifestyle guru. “If we didn’t have Turkey Hill Road, I wouldn’t be the Martha Stewart I am today,” she says.
The marriage didn’t last — because, she says, her husband cheated on her and that makes him “a piece of s–t.” Adamant about her zero-tolerance policy for cheating husbands, she admits under questioning that she had an affair with “a very attractive Irishman” and then keeps repeating, “It was nothing. It was nothing.”
This becomes something of a running theme throughout “Martha”: Stewart dismisses her own transgressions lightly, but comes down hard on other people when they don’t live up to her idea of perfection. She allows Cutler access to letters that she wrote to her husband as their marriage was breaking up, but resists talking about it. “I gave you letters that were very personal,” she says, rigidly composed as she sits in her chair and refuses to go into any detail. “So take it from there.”
The story is interesting enough that it’s OK for Stewart to tell it from behind the walls she’s erected: a hugely successful publishing empire, a growing reputation for being mean to subordinates — and then the moment when she may have been improperly tipped off to sell ImClone stock just before its value plummeted. The marquee moment came not when she went to court after being indicted for obstruction of justice, but when she appeared on “CBS This Morning” for a cooking segment and chafed at anchor Jane Clayson’s repeated questions about the case. “I want to focus on my salad,” she said.
The film devotes considerable time to the trial — and to Stewart’s contention that she did nothing wrong, didn’t remember the details of the conversation with her broker and was the victim of selective prosecution (for lying rather than insider trading) because she was a wildly successful target for a group of reporters and prosecutors she refers to in the film as “a tower of sanctimonious f–king twats.”
It’s hard to watch this stretch of the film without coming away with two opinions: Yes, she was the target of selective prosecution, and yes, she dumped the stock after receiving information she shouldn’t have had. That doesn’t mean she should have been jailed for five months — “putting me here is a joke and everyone seems to know it,” she wrote in her prison diary — but it doesn’t exactly justify admittedly colorful lines like “those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high.”
Then again, Stewart’s facility with a mean joke helped give her life and career a third act that provides the most entertaining section of “Martha.” After prison, she signed a deal to host a show for “The Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett but hated the show; the value of Martha Stewart Omnimedia plummeted; her boyfriend of 15 years, billionaire Charles Simonyi, told her he was marrying someone else, whose parents didn’t want him to ever speak to Stewart again.
Then, in 2015, she agreed to be on a Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber, where her vicious putdowns brought the house down and paved the way for a career with her new pal Snoop Dogg and shows like “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party.”
It is a ridiculous and wacky kind of comeback, and it gives “Martha” the kind of conclusion you’d never expect if we hadn’t all been watching it play out over the last decade. This is Martha Stewart the shrewd hustler, who has figured out how to take the hits and come out on top — and the film’s homestretch is filled with talk about how Martha has calmed down, how she’s not as much of a perfectionist as she used to be, how she’s learned to adapt and change.
And then Cutler turns the camera on Stewart, and she’s still dismissing lines of questioning and shutting down a bit even as she laughs and says, “Imperfections are a little bit more…OK than they were when I was younger.”
If you say so, Martha. If you say so.
“Martha” will be released by Netflix.
