R.J. Cutler tells the elusive mogul’s story in MARTHA.
Here’s a tricky proposition: How do you make an introspective, revealing documentary about someone who is not prone to being introspective or all that revealing, at least in public? R.J. Cutler has the answer in MARTHA, his intimate documentary about a pop culture staple and business icon we all think we know so well. “Martha said to me many times that reflecting was not something that she wanted to be doing, which, of course, poses a challenge for the documentary filmmaker,” says Cutler.
Martha Stewart has been a famous figure for decades, a paragon of taste, wealth, and the American dream, but in this documentary we get to peek behind the facade of the enigmatic, engrossing public presence. “As much as any subject I’ve ever worked with, one needed to earn Martha’s trust. But it was clear,” says Cutler — known for the masterful documentaries Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry and The September Issue — “that she was looking for an opportunity to trust someone.”
After all, while Stewart hasn’t been an oversharer herself, the media has been more than willing to tell its version of her story again and again, in every which way it chooses. Throughout her remarkable rise from humble Connecticut caterer all the way to nucleus of her eponymous lifestyle brand — which, at its peak, encompassed a monthly magazine, books, and a daily TV show populated with recipe and design ideas, plus a homeware line with Kmart — she was caricatured and characterized by the press as über-controlling and almost too perfect. When Stewart was accused and eventually convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice, landing her in jail for five months, the tabloids and TV news relished in schadenfreude.
Now, at 82 years old, firmly in the calm after the chaos, Stewart has an opportunity to offer a more evenhanded take on this incredible arc. “It became clear to me that not only did Martha have an extraordinary story to tell, but she was eager to tell it,” Cutler says. “I knew that the various narratives of her life story had been told in different ways, but never from her perspective — never by her. She was open.”
Martha Stewart in her Westport, Connecticut kitchen in August 1976
Photograph by Susan Wood / Getty Images.
It became clear to me that not only did Martha have an extraordinary story to tell, but she was eager to tell it. I knew that the various narratives of her life story had been told in different ways, but never from her perspective — never by her. She was open.
R.J. Cutler
As seen in the documentary, the real story of Stewart is of someone with spotless taste and almost preternatural intelligence, ambition, and talent; she’s one of those people who makes everything they touch a little bit better. Her mission was to bring a sense of discernment and sophistication to the average American consumer, to manifest the idea of homemaking and “living” into an art form. With her accessible products and helpful guides, she largely succeeded, so much so that her company became publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. “I was maligned for being a perfectionist, criticized for trying to create a lifestyle that was unattainable,” Stewart says in MARTHA. “What I was really trying to do was educate.”
The movie quotes an essay by Joan Didion on Stewart’s impact on the American woman of the 1990s and early 2000s, a symbol “not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.” And because of that dynamism, Cutler chose to make Stewart the only talking head in the documentary — friends and family, including her only daughter Alexis, are only heard in voiceover. “What was compelling to me,” he says, “was to see Martha.”
Born Martha Kostyra, Stewart spent her childhood in New Jersey, strongly influenced by her heavy drinker of a father — a “perfectionist,” “sergeant,” and “dissatisfied, unhappy human being.” Always gorgeous, she began to model as a teenager and her money went to help support the family. Then, she won a scholarship to prestigious Barnard College in New York City. “I was looking for adventure, I was looking for . . . the future,” she says.
A wealthy classmate set her up with their brother, Yale Law School student Andy Stewart, a sweet, sophisticated guy described in the film as “a beam of light.” But, as the first in a series of shocking personal revelations, Martha shares that her father objected to their wedding: She’d have to prove her mettle in order to make a life with Andy. “I said, ‘I’m going to get married no matter what you think,’” she remembers.
Martha Stewart in her Bedford, New York kitchen in 2021
Photograph by Murray Hall / Trunk Archive.
Stewart’s ascent is lovingly and admiringly rendered — MARTHA posits her as the “original influencer,” someone who attracted the world’s attention through the sheer splendor of her existence long before social media existed — and it is remarkable to see a catalog of all she’s achieved. The initial public offering of her company’s stock in 1999 made her the first self-made female billionaire in American history, and she was an early pioneer in understanding that you could build an entire multinational company around the power of one person’s celebrity.
But that was also a double-edged sword: When the brand is a human being, it’s susceptible to human fallibility. In late 2001, a stock sale she made drew attention from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) for raising insider trading flags. A high-profile trial ensued, she was pilloried in the press, and her company’s value sunk. “It was obscene, and I had to keep my composure,” she says. “And not cry — remember, women in business don’t cry.”
Stewart was convicted on felony charges in 2004 and handed a five-month term in a federal prison, which she went on to serve. Cutler was able to secure diaries she wrote during her time in prison. These introspective and handwritten journal entries reveal a woman understandably indignant and uncharacteristically downtrodden, but they also show moments of strength, resolution, and resilience. She made friends with fellow inmates who were gardeners and craftspeople, and even found a way to bring a little Martha zhuzh into the environment: One of her friends from behind bars recalls Stewart making cucumber sandwiches for the other women in the prison.
By the time her sentence was completed, she was fully prepared to pick up where she left off. “Listen, here’s this girl from a family of eight in Nutley, New Jersey living modestly, who gets a good idea, builds it into something really fine, and profits from it. That’s basically my story. And then [she] falls in a hole,” says Stewart.
As MARTHA documents, after prison, things didn’t entirely work out the way she hoped, but even amid some ups and downs, the viewer feels closely invested in Stewart’s perseverance. Cutler not only uncovers incredible archival footage of her that gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the unvarnished Stewart, but also includes letters she wrote to her husband Andy while they were going through an infidelity-filled divorce in 1990, presenting an entirely different, and wholly vulnerable, side to her personality.
Martha Stewart
She’s a remarkable woman who wakes up every day confronting the world with enormous curiosity, vigor, and energy, but she’s also very complicated.
R.J. Cutler
Throughout the film, it’s also hard not to be swayed by her clear and unabating commitment to the cause of good taste and living beautifully: Cutler jokes that even the filming process was Martha-ized. “The baked goods in the middle of the afternoon were as delicious as one could have hoped for,” he remembers of filming days. He recounts a moment when he was at home cooking a chowder that he felt was missing something he couldn’t quite name; he called Stewart, she gave him some tips, and it ended up being “among the best meals I’ve ever cooked.”
The interviews themselves, conducted over the course of a week at her home in Maine, are charming in their Martha-ness: She never gushes, she remains pursed about even the most emotional of details, and she displays a cutting tongue.
You get the sense, after all these years, that the Martha we experience on the screen is the Martha she wants to be — imperfectly perfect, tough through her tribulations, realistic about her triumphs and her failures, still guarded, maybe, but with the self-awareness that pretty much any possible bit of guile or gossip that could be said about someone has been said about her.
“She’s a remarkable woman who wakes up every day confronting the world with enormous curiosity, vigor, and energy, but she’s also very complicated,” Cutler says. “She’s demanding — she’s as much of a perfectionist as we experience and somebody who’s lived an extremely rich and complicated life. She’s the woman that you see in the film.”
