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 that premiered Wednesday 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 publicized trial — dubbed a “b— 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. It features a probing interview with Stewart, who is by turns cagey and bluntly honest. It also includes intimate photos, diary entries and letters from Stewart’s personal archive.
“Martha” doesn’t gloss over Stewart’s prickly, demanding personality, but it also makes the case that she was unfairly maligned — and ultimately prosecuted — because of her gender. Over the last few years, popular culture has been offering sympathetic reappraisals of scandal-plagued women from the not too distant past like Monica Lewinsky,Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. Finally, it’s Stewart’s turn for a reassessment.