Reel Rundown: While Martha Stewart herself may not like her Netflix biopic, filmmaker had plenty to work with

By now the word is out: Martha Stewart “hates” the Netflix documentary that purports to tell the story of her life.

In an interview with the New York Times, Stewart fumed about the things that director R.J. Cutler put in his film – and what he left out.

She hated, for example, scenes near the end where she is seen, she said, “looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden.” The problem, she said, was less about her age, 83, than the ruptured Achilles tendon she’d suffered.

She also resented Cutler’s emphasis of her legal problems (she was convicted in 2004 of lying to the FBI during an insider-trading investigation), which take up a good portion of the film’s second half.

“It was not that important,” Stewart said. “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.”

What about her grandchildren? she fumed. What about the attempts the lawyer Alan Dershowitz made to flirt with her during the 1960s, when she was still married? And why use all those unflattering camera angles?

Stewart may have a point. Cutler apparently had hours of footage to work with, some of which no doubt would have pleased his subject. But filmmakers have their own priorities, and they don’t always align with those of their subjects.

Yet while Cutler doesn’t deliver a completely flattering portrayal of Stewart, he does credit her with having the smarts and drive that made her into not only a billionaire, not only the head of a successful corporation but actually someone – a woman, no less – who remade a role that had become unpopular, that of homemaker. Not only had she remade it, she’d made herself its very symbol.

As one of the many people (too many to keep track of) Cutler quotes as saying, “Martha was the first influencer.”

All of this is included in a movie that Stewart now finds less than perfect. Whatever she thinks, though, it is a movie that makes one thing about her abundantly clear.

As one final commentator claims, “She is the mother of reinvention.”