RJ Cutler’s Martha Stewart Documentary for Netflix

From teenage model to luxury caterer, from domestic doyenne to media-famous billionaire, from convicted scapegoat to octogenarian with a passion for thirst traps and a friend of Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart has had a life that defies belief, or at least coherence.

It’s an improbable journey that has unfolded largely in the public eye, which gives RJ Cutler a particular challenge with his new Netflix documentary, Martha. Maybe some younger viewers don’t know what Martha Stewart’s life was like before she was hosting dinner parties with Snoop Dogg. Maybe some older viewers thought that after spending time in the prison misnamed Camp Cupcake, Martha Stewart had slipped into embarrassing obscurity.

That’s probably the intended audience for this 115-minute documentary: people impressed enough to be interested in Martha Stewart, but not curious enough to actively follow her journey. It’s a very, very simple, linear documentary in which the actual revelations are limited more by your consciousness than anything else.

But instead of revelations, what is holding back? Martha What’s captivating is watching Cutler attack and parry his subject. The prolific documentarian has made films about the likes of Anna Wintour and Dick Cheney, so he knows his way around prickly stars, and in Martha Stewart he has a heroine with enough clout and a well-earned sense of humor that she says exactly what she wants to say in the context in which she wants to say it. Icy when she wants to be, selectively candid when it serves her purposes, Stewart makes Martha It’s almost a collaboration: half the story it wants to tell and half the extent to which Cutler adheres to that story. And that last point, much more than the completely bland biographical embellishments and the routine formal approach, is entertaining.

Cutler has focused the spotlight exclusively on Stewart. While he conducted numerous interviews for the documentary, with friends, colleagues, family members and even a few adversaries, only Stewart gets an on-screen interview. Everyone else gets a chance to weigh in in audio-only conversations that are meant to take place behind footage of Martha over the years, as well as the present-day access Stewart gave the production to what appears to have been mostly her lavish Turkey Hill farm.

These “access” scenes, in which Stewart goes about his business without acknowledging the camera, illustrate his general approach to documentary, which I might summarize as follows: “I’m willing to give you my time, but mostly in a way that suits me.”

At 83 and still busier than almost any human being on the planet, Stewart has less need for this documentary…