Earlier this summer, Netflix began teasing that it had landed a documentary about Martha Stewart which promised to offer a wholly unique look at the domestic mogul who is known for her carefully curated image. Directed by R.J. Cutler, a documentarian whose past subjects include Elton John, Billie Eilish and Anna Wintour, “Martha” was the result of “hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with Stewart and those from her inner circle, along with Stewart’s private archives of diaries, letters, and never-seen-before footage,” according to the streamer.
However, as the year progressed and the film began making the festival circuit, it seemed the documentary didn’t live up to Stewart’s initial expectations. In September, after the film debuted, Stewart reportedly called the project “lazy” and “not the story that makes me, me” at the 2024 Retail Influencer CERO Forum.
She didn’t expand much beyond that, other than to say the film focused too heavily on her trial which was rather boring relative to the rest of her life. However, now that “Martha” has finally debuted on Netflix, Stewart is getting more candid about her feelings surrounding the documentary.
During a half-hour conversation with the New York Times’ Brooks Barnes — which he described as “30 almost uninterrupted minutes of sharp critique” — Stewart detailed what, in her mind, were the film’s numerous shortcomings, starting with how Cutler used the ample archival material with which she had provided him. “R.J. had total access, and he really used very little,” Stewart told Barnes. “It was just shocking.”
Some of Stewart’s complaints were more superficial, like how she disliked the camera angles Cutler chose for shooting her, or that she wanted the film to feature music that was more representative of her personal tastes — less “lousy classical score” and more Dr. Dre, Snoop or Fredwreck.
But the heart of her dissatisfaction was about how the film portrayed her. In her mind, Cutler didn’t do enough to contextualize what a groundbreaking product “Martha Stewart” magazine was.
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“We had avant-garde photography,” Stewart said. “Nobody ever showed puff pastry the way I showed it. Or the glossaries of the apples and the chrysanthemums. And we prided ourselves so much on all of that modernism. And he didn’t get any of that.”
She also disliked the final scenes of the film which seemed to paint her as feeble, especially as she shows no sign of slowing down at the age of 83.
“Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden? Boy, I told him to get rid of those,” Stewart told Barnes, explaining that she was limping a bit following a surgery on her Achilles tendon.
“And he refused,” Stewart continued. “I hate those last scenes. Hate them.”
For his part, Cutler has been reserved in his responses to Stewart’s searing critique of the film.
“I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it,” he told the New York Times. “I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.”
“Martha” is now available to stream on Netflix.
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