‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler’s Splendid Documentary Taps Into Everything We Love, and Don’t, About Martha Stewart
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Martha,” R.J. Cutler’s film about the life and career of Martha Stewart, is a splendid documentary.
It’s a movie that captures how Martha Stewart’s penetration into American culture seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it was unlikely.
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.
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