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‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler’s Splendid Documentary Taps Into Everything We Love, and Don’t, About Martha Stewart
R.J. Cutler's splendid documentary takes us through her rise and fall and rise, a transfixing saga rooted in a meditation on The Meaning of Martha.
It traces how she started off as a model, then became a stockbroker, then moved with her publishing-magnate husband to Westport, Conn., where they bought a fixer-upper, Turkey Hill Farm, whose fixing up, by Martha (she hand-painted the entire farmhouse while listening to the Watergate hearings), became the prototype for her brand of obsessively tasteful rustic “perfection.” It shows us how she launched a prestige catering business and then, with the 1982 book “Entertaining,” launched herself as the doyenne of a new upscale lifestyle culture that would be — in a word — vicarious. The movie shows us that Stewart had a vision, and that her creative genius at shabby-chic retro design and intricate but insistently “user-friendly” recipes was matched by her business acumen, which turned her into the first self-made woman billionaire in America. The mirage of her brand came tumbling down, of course, when she was accused of insider trading, after she’d dumped shares of ImClone stock on the same day that the company’s owner, Sam Waksal (a friend of hers), and his family members did.
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