“Martha” presents a side of Martha Stewart we haven’t seen before: her, in her voice

Martha Stewart is not big shares his feelings. For the millions who have voraciously devoured her legendary meanness over the years, this is far from news. And this could become an obstacle for some documentarians.

This knowledge explains why RJ Cutler opens “Martha” by asking Stewart what she dislikes most. “That’s a hard question to answer,” Stewart says in her signature monotone voice, which she uses when she’s not selling you something. Her long list includes wastefulness, inefficiency, avoidance, and impatience—known (“I don’t like not paying attention to details”), unknown brands (“I don’t like aprons and house dresses”), and some thoughts about color that the director leaves behind unexplained

They sit in the silence that follows, with the shot lingering on Stewart’s face, watching her react to the space that isn’t filled with conversation or question. Stewart leaves it for a moment, then smiles in a way that can best be described as unpleasant. “Okay,” she says shortly. “Further”.

In the end, we understand why Cutler provokes her in this way. Stewart has spent most of her life building a facade of impenetrability and invulnerability, controlling and creating an image of a calm, confident experience. Emotions are messy.

Martha Stewart, the brand and the person, is as graceful and orderly as the gardens that give purpose to her life. Her dislikes are weeds that matter less, if at all, than what she values. She considers this issue mandatory, but perhaps not essential. Pretty soon we understand his role in deciphering the woman sitting before us in the center of a luxurious room with a lush bouquet of star lilies behind her.

On “Martha,” Stewart colors his words into effervescent pleasantness, only to let out flashes of discomfort when the silence lingers for a second or two that are far more telling. What registers on her face as she lists each item she doesn’t like is the baseline, the Rosetta Stone. This conversation prepares us to scrutinize what she doesn’t say or refuses to put into words, the details that make “Martha” truly moving and honest.

“Some people enjoy self-pity and so on and so forth. I just don’t want to,” Stewart says as she approaches the section of her story that requires her to describe the collapse of her marriage while on a promotional tour to promote her book, The Wedding.

“I passed on letters that were very personal,” she said. “So guess what?” Take it out of the letters.’

Yes, Martha wrote down her life recipe and opened those journals and documents to Cutler and me. It’s all part of Stewart’s guidelines for how she’s presented. Sybil Shepherd she may have portrayed her plight in two made-for-TV movies, but Stewart’s real heartbreak dialogue is second to none.

“I need to go to San Francisco and talk about ‘The Wedding’ and my wonderful life,” Stewart wrote in one of her letters to her increasingly distant husband. “I hope you are enjoying your freedom. And I hope my plane goes down.”

Martha (courtesy of Netflix)

Watching “Martha” is as soothing as flipping through the glossy pages of “Life” with a parade of retouched and expertly composed photographs, interspersed with archival footage and illustrations that serve as a refined alternative to reconstructions. It fulfills what Joan Didion describes in his 2000 New Yorker essay about the “unusual bond” and “proprietary intimacy” Stewart creates with us—her people, her consumers, her devourers.

“Martha” introduces a constellation of voices we haven’t heard before, including a brother and sister who talk about the struggles of their home life when they were children. Cutler is not a fan of overt psychoanalysis, but the choice to craft a narrative under the influence of Edward Kostyra’s iron hand rather than portray Stewart’s mother, a beloved regular on her daytime show, is an eye-opener. The father was demanding – “mean, mean” – that’s all Stewart offers.

Her passion for gardening comes from making plant-based meals for her children so the family could eat. The juxtaposition of her surveying the grounds of her estate and telling her landscaping staff what she wants done against the echo of her brother Eric Scott’s voice saying, “To this day I despise gardening” is withering.

Among the background figures in her intended one-woman show, however, he casts the longest shadow – a fascinating piece of embroidery on what is essentially the story of America’s relationship with femininity. We love second chances, constant innovators, and people who would rather be rich than loved.

However, the latter hints at the darker side of our love affairs with celebrities, especially women, in the way we celebrate loudly when the tallest fliers fall from the sky. Stewart may now be worth $400 million, but her conviction on charges related to the insider trading scandal has cost her about a billion dollars.

She has since been vindicated in the court of public opinion, but Stewart has not forgiven the men who used her conviction to advance their political careers, including James Comey. (“These prosecutors should have been put in Cuisinart and turned on high,” she snaps.)

But if this is the most exposed Stewart she allows herself to be, then we also have to admit that the only current Stewart interview footage features her and only her. Martha Stewart doesn’t do warts, but Cutler brings wry irony to the artful coverage of her spots, like her refusal to see her marital infidelity as equivalent to her husband’s. We can laugh at Stewart’s brazen hypocrisy because, as we should know by now, Stewart defines the world as she sees it.

Stewart’s influence has been celebrated and scrutinized since she rose to national prominence with her first bestseller, Entertaining. Her rise from lifestyle writer to housewife empress, along with her downfall and brief incarceration, spawned endless specials, gossip columns, parodies, and unauthorized biographies, both serious and salacious.

The four-episode CNN series “The Many Lives of Martha Stewart,” which aired in January, is probably the most comprehensive and dispassionate analysis of Stewart’s life and career to date that doesn’t include her voice. Students of Stewart may find it interesting to watch or review it with “Martha,” as Cutler finds what the most thoroughly researched and sourced always miss: her humanity.

Stewart doesn’t complain about her perfectionism or lack of warmth, which she freely suggests is why her closest relationships have suffered. The illusion of single-handedly building her empire brick by brick is at the heart of the mystique and legend of Martha Stewart, and a major source of irritation for many of those who worked with her and whose contributions have gone unremarked.

Voices from Stewart’s inner circle are heard behind the scenes Snoop(naturally); Martha Stewart Living Founding Editor-in-Chief Isolde Motley; Andy Monness, who worked with Stewart on Wall Street before catering, and other close friends. Some of them are kind and incredibly honest about who she is. One suggests, “She has such wrong ideas about success.” Another describes it as a slur that rhymes with the word “itch.”

They contextualize her personality but don’t speak for her, even when she can’t or won’t consider the most compelling revelations Cutler shows us, which are palpable loneliness and pain.

Describing her romantic relationships, Stewart admits, “I’m not so interested in knowing, ‘Oh, Charles, how are you feeling right now?’ I really don’t care,” she says. “I’m worried about the question, ‘Charles, what are you doing?’ What are you thinking about? So I kind of gravitate towards people who are always doing something.”

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“Martha” sheds a dark light on Martha’s troubled relationship with her daughter Alexis, which was so widely known at one point that Stewart included her in a “Mystery Science Theater 3000” spin-off called “Whatever, Martha” to tease about mother’s relentless pursuit of perfection and ambition.

We were privy to a more difficult grief in their story, which reveals much about what was expected of women in the Stuart era, and what it cost her to refuse to confine herself to those constraints.

“What is more important – marriage or career?” she asks. you tell me her inquisitor snaps back at her, and she somewhat blankly concludes, “I don’t know.”

Whenever “Martha” captures these moments of introspection, we see her eponymous figure exposed for what she is: ambitious and demanding, visionary and innovative, sharp and task-obsessed. It’s easy to get confused when you’re dancing in corners where the only way out is introspection. Built to charge forward, not look back or inward.

Stewart often refers to himself as a teacher. Through “Marty,” Cutler also becomes an instructor of sorts, tracing the sharp angles, lines, and blurred boundaries she’s created in her life. Whether these are necessary ingredients for a bittersweet romance that an ambitious woman develops with herself remains debatable. Based on everything else we’ve read and watched, this is the piece that finally helps us understand Stewart in all her fullness.

Martha is now streaming on Netflix. The Many Lives of Martha Stewart is available to stream on Max.