Martha Stewart not shy in lambasting ‘Martha’

Martha Stewart isn’t making any attempts to sugarcoat her opinion of “Martha,” a documentary that arrived on Netflix Wednesday after a run on the fall festival circuit.

Maybe as a media savant she appreciates the startling power of candor. Or maybe, at 83, she just has no more you-know-whats left to give.

Whatever the motivation, she doesn’t have much nice to say about her experience with documentarian R.J. Cutler. An interview with Stewart turned into 30 almost-uninterrupted minutes of sharp critique.

“R.J. had total access, and he really used very little,” she said, referring to her archive. “It was just shocking.”

Cutler declined to comment on specific points.

“I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it,” he said. “I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.”

He added, “It’s the story of an incredibly interesting human being who is complicated and visionary and brilliant.”

In Stewart’s view, the film’s second half is “a bit lazy.”

“Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden? Boy, I told him to get rid of those. And he refused. I hate those last scenes. Hate them.

“I had ruptured my Achilles tendon. I had to have this hideous operation. And so I was limping a little. But again, he doesn’t even mention why — that I can live through that and still work seven days a week.”

She called the music “lousy.”

“I said to R.J., ‘An essential part of the film is that you play rap music.’ Dr. Dre will probably score it, or Snoop or Fredwreck. I said, ‘I want that music.’ And then he gets some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”

She also said Cutler chose unflattering camera angles.

“He had three cameras on me. And he chooses to use the ugliest angle. And I told him, ‘Don’t use that angle! That’s not the nicest angle. You had three cameras. Use the other angle.’ He would not change that.”

She argued that what made her magazine special was lost.

“My magazine, my Martha Stewart magazine, which you might say is traditional, was the most modern home magazine ever created. We had avant-garde photography. Nobody ever showed puff pastry the way I showed it. Or the glossaries of the apples and the chrysanthemums. And we prided ourselves so much on all of that modernism. And he didn’t get any of that.”

In contrast, the documentary spends “way too much time” on her 2004 trial and prison sentence, she said.

“It was not that important. The trial and the actual incarceration was less than two years out of an 83-year life. I considered it a vacation, to tell you the truth.”

And if that’s not enough — and it’s not for her — Cutler also left her grandkids out of the film.

“Where the heck are my grandchildren?” she wondered of her daughter’s children, who are 12 and 13. “There’s not even a mention. And these grandchildren are utterly fantastic.”

So, is there anything about the show that she likes?

“I love the first half of the documentary. It gets into things that many people don’t know anything about, which is what I like about it,” she said.

She acknowledged that viewers may be more forgiving of the film, focusing more on its ultimate message.

“So many girls have already told me — young women — that watching it gave them a strength that they didn’t know they had,” she said. “And that’s the thing I like most about the documentary. It really shows a strong woman standing up for herself and living through horror as well as some huge success.

“That’s what I wanted the documentary to be. It shouldn’t be me boasting about inner strength and any of that crap. It should be about showing that you can get through life and still be yourself.”