Martha, Netflix’s Martha Stewart documentary, delves into life and trials of ‘a visionary’
Director of Martha on cooking queen’s rags-to-riches story, the men who put her down, and why she’s an ‘unreliable narrator’ of her own life
The way Martha Stewart sees it, her life story is pretty simple.
“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,” she says in Martha, a documentary now streaming on Netflix. Then, Stewart continues, she “falls in a hole” and has to climb out of it.
Martha offers a slightly more nuanced version of this journey, showing how Stewart overcame her humble origins to create a multimedia lifestyle company worth billions by, as she once put it, “celebrating something that’s been put down for so long”.
But Stewart’s business success also made her a target. Her empire began to unravel in 2004, when she was convicted of obstruction of justice charges in a heavily publicised trial – dubbed a “b***h hunt” – that seemed to be as much about her personality as the criminal code.
Directed by R.J. Cutler, Martha takes a revealing look at Stewart’s difficult upbringing, her contentious marriage to publisher Andy Stewart, her brief but transformative stint in prison, and her successful rebranding as a savvy octogenarian influencer and Snoop Dogg collaborator.
