Martha review – sharp if spotty Netflix retrospective on Martha Stewart

Who was the original influencer? Cases have been made for Paris Hilton, Anna Wintour, the British royal family, the first round of mommy bloggers, Andy Warhol, Grace Kelly, the Kardashians. But when it comes to leveraging the performance of one’s personal life to market an aesthetic, hinging business on pristine public brand, it’s tough to top Martha Stewart. As a new Netflix documentary directed by RJ Cutler argues, the “doyenne of domesticity” pioneered the art of selling a lifestyle – how to be an effortlessly chic hostess, a savvy cook, a glamorous gardener and a shrewd decorator, while still being a modern woman. Or, to put it in the parlance of the time during which she transformed her New York-centric catering business into a media empire: how to be a woman and have it all.

Related: Here review – cursed Forrest Gump reunion is a total horror show

Was it empowering? Did being the self-made billionaire of picture-perfect domesticity make her a feminist? Was she ruthless, or a prisoner to her own perfectionism? The sharp yet spotty film poses many such questions and, though clearly well-sourced in Stewart’s personal archive, ends up answering few. To be fair, people are more complex than such binaries, and Stewart is famously not forthcoming on anything less than, as she loved to say, “perfectly perfect”. She can be blunt on certain points – her beloved, complicated father’s bigotry and lasting imprint of perfectionism, for one – but Martha lacks the revelatory, remarkably revealing self-awareness of Cutler’s last celebrity film, the verité-style Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which remains the standout pop star documentary of the decade.

Still, Cutler is familiar with steely, implacable moguls, having trailed Anna Wintour for the 2009 film The September Issue, and wrings some subtle insight via the film’s roving structure and linger of the camera. The almost two-hour retrospective, of sorts, opens with Stewart as a fount of words on a question of her dislikes: waste, inefficiency, avoidance, impatience, people who think they can do more than they can do, not paying attention to details, being mean just to be mean, aprons, housedresses and formerly the color purple (nowadays, she is “not fond of” red). Compare that, as Cutler does, to answers on her infidelities, her husband Andrew Stewart’s serial cheating, the iciness of her Catholic upbringing in a struggling family of eight in New Jersey, or her reputation for being rude to staff – a curt sentence or two, twitch of the lip, resounding silence. “Can we get on to a happier subject?” she says at one point during what appears to be her one sit-down interview.

The film mostly obliges Stewart’s proclivity to only move forward, letting her opine on, among other things, gardening, her first taste of glamour in Europe, a brief dalliance with a stranger in Florence’s Duomo, how male executives underestimated her business plan, double standards and more gardening. It’s left to friends, associates and family to fill in the less savory aspects of fame, success and her unrelenting standards of perfection. At select points that form the high points of the film, Cutler draws from Stewart’s own letters (during the demise of her marriage) or diaries (during her prison stay), which are raw, desperate, witty and scathing in a way the rest of her appearances past and present never are.

As the influencer extraordinaire, Stewart is never less than compelling. Martha is enjoyable as a truly American tale of rise, fall and rise again; the section on Stewart’s sensational 2004 trial for lying to federal agents, about a crime that she still maintains never happened, convinces that Stewart deserves space in the canon of recent reconsiderations of how culture (mis)treated female celebrities. (I’ll leave the last word to Stewart: “Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high.”)

Still, some claims go frustratingly un-interrogated, such as the declaration of Stewart as America’s first self-made female billionaire to triumphant orchestral music (the film has little interest in critiquing wealth), the campiness inherent in her remarkable resurgence as social media’s pre-eminent sexy grandma, or the claim by her magazine’s editor-in-chief that going to prison “set her free”. (The film, either in taking on Stewart’s view or through its own accord, never considers Stewart’s five-month stint at Alderson federal prison in West Virginia, including the genuinely harrowing experience of solitary confinement and the friendships she forged there, as anything more than grist for her own personal resurgence.)

Some of the storytelling, particularly in the legal-heavy sections, is hampered by illustrations that I can imagine Stewart dismissing as gussied-up courtroom sketches. Recreations are a tough sell in any documentary, and in this case only serve to underscore the missing elements – courtroom photos, for one, or on-camera sit-downs, as most of the interviews woven into the film, whether original interviews or archival, are audio-only (including, curiously, with Stewart’s only child, Alexis). More annoyingly, they take away from footage of Stewart herself, wrestling with her composure before the camera – something I would watch three times as much as what was provided here.

Martha is, after all, the star – a fascinating narrator of her own life, sometimes direct, sometimes curiously opaque or self-contradictory, always evincing a glowing, undaunted ambition. As the OG influencer, she lived the rule: whatever happens, just keep pushing forward. The people will keep watching.

• Martha is now available on Netflix