Martha is a documentary about entrepreneur Martha Stewart. Photo / Netflix
Martha (R, 115 mins) Streaming on Netflix
Directed by R.J. Cutler
Reviewed by Jen Shieff
Compelling to watch, a lot of self-made billionaires are intriguing, just by virtue of having amassed their fortunes.
But in the case of Martha Stewart, the compulsion is more about staring at her long enough to find out what’s beneath her steely surface, whether she was actually guilty of insider trading and did she deserve to lose her fortune.
“Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high,” she says, always denying she’d ever done anything wrong.
After nearly two hours of staring at interview footage, piles of historic stills and clips covering her action-packed 80 years, with animation for the scenes inside the prison where cameras couldn’t go, she remains a mystery.
The film-making is a bit too much of a scrapbook, the music sometimes overpowering, but it’s interesting all the same, if not conclusive.
Able to thrive in a male-dominated business world including being the first woman on Wall Street, Martha Stewart broke the glass ceiling, to become at one stage the wealthiest woman in the world, having come from nothing.
Her confidence led her to always have half an eye on the camera, helpful that she was always regarded as glamorous.
Even in her seventies, she found ways of communicating with a much younger market, looking stuffy and prim and yet being a friend of Snoop Dogg, wowing the younger generation with her irreverent wit, as she rebuilt her empire post-prison.
Seemingly disconnected from anything to do with her own home, she was literally a home-maker, changing attitudes to what it meant to be a housewife.
Furnishings, recipes, cookware, colours and flowers have made her a household word.
“It’s a good thing” is her motto, along with learning something new every day, always being open to change and giving shoppers things they didn’t know they needed.
Possibly the first woman of the sixties to be an influencer, she is marketing products that let people feel part of an idealised lifestyle of New England-style country houses and paths among rustling trees.
Dressed in beige with just the right amount of accessorising, Martha Stewart is less flamboyant than that other empire builder Oprah, who features briefly, far less caring about what people might think of her.
Martha is not as icy as Anna Wintour, shown in R.J. Cutler’s The September Issue (2009).
However, she’s somehow impermeable except for the voice-over of her tragic letters to her husband in the failing days of her marriage and her prison diaries with reports of the relationships she built with prisoners while helping them to think like entrepreneurs.
Even in her garden, her happy place, she needs to be in control, a point made strongly by R.J. Cutler in his good, if rather patchy, documentary.
As a CEO, Martha Stewart reached great heights and although she crashed and burned, she dusted herself as she disembarked her partner’s private jet, her taxi away from prison, and started all over again, despite having lost a lot of her mojo.
Inspiring.
★★★
Homegrown is returning to its roots and being welcomed with open arms.