Martha Behind Bars: a review

I didn't think I'd get big into evening TV this fall, but when you are an avid knitter, you must have something besides silence to stitch on. Therefore, I am willing to watch even dreck, provided it doesn't violate my moral sensibilities. And TV movies are some of the best dreck there is.

Let me start out by saying that I'm not really a Martha fan. I don't know much about her except that, like Debbie Fields, she survived a nasty divorce and went on to start a successful company. We are all familiar with Martha's "housewife" ethos, though, and the movie milks that appropriately--there's a cooking scene in which she insists all the spices be freshly ground; and in another scene she testily plucks a flower arrangement off the set, saying, "My readers don't want to spend their hard-earned money to look at the same flower arrangement we had four months ago." Her business is built on presenting an image of housewifery that no one can really aspire to and, as the movie makes clear, she is anything but a housewife herself.

In fact, the film is an unflattering portrait of the person. Martha is played by a plushy (or padded?) Cybill Shepherd who can't quite affect Martha's look but is uncannily "on" with her voice--just close your eyes and it's Martha. It's not charitable to assume, however, that Cybill's presentation is a fair one. Martha is portrayed as a consummate, calculating corporate shark with a cell phone in one hand, a palm pilot in the other, and a team of assistants dogging her footsteps. She is demanding, acquisitive, and cold. In the spice-grinding scene she brings her mother onto the set with great hoopla, only to leave her alone with an assistant who does the actual cooking, while Martha breezes off to another stage to have her picture shoot for next month's magazine. When her friend Mariana Pasternak tells her of her aspirations to sell real estate, Martha brushes her off with, "Seems like everyone and her sister is selling real estate these days." Later you feel a sense of justice when Mariana is the one who reveals Martha's culpability for the stock sale in court.

While the first hour follows Martha's wildly successful public offering of Martha Steward Omnimedia and the subsequent unraveling of her public image as the SEC investigation drags on, the second half of the film is consumed with Martha's life in a minimum security federal prison. The music is dramatic, but while Martha may be in prison, she is hardly "behind bars." She receives regular visitors and communicates with her supportive fans via mail and a personal web site addressed to them. She doesn't have to endure much indignity--I would think that the other inmates would have been more harsh or rejecting--although the guards are faceless stuffed shirts who treat Martha as callously as one might expect, down to the strip search and an implied body cavity search.

In fact, the prison sequence seems to be an attempt to squeeze some character development into Ms. Shepherd's curiously wooden performance. While Martha tries to stay "above it all," the other inmates won't let her. They eventually reveal themselves as more compassionate and accepting than Martha herself, who finally defrosts enough to help the gals with the Christmas decorating contest, which was the most heartwarming scene in the film. The famous poncho that a fellow inmate knitted for her makes continual appearances throughout this sequence, although what inspires the woman to gift Ms. Stewart with this labor of love is anyone's guess. By the time Martha leaves prison her stock has tripled, her business suit is back on, and she greets her welcoming staff with the words, "Now where were we?"

While I didn't have very high hopes for a TV movie of this type to deliver an inspiring message for the sake of humanity, I did expect it to deliver a story. Every beginning writer knows that in a story you have to have not only a sequence of events, but a main character that readers (or viewers) can expect to relate to at some point--that must progress through the conflict in such a way as to CHANGE THEM SOMEHOW. In this respect, "Martha Behind Bars" fails miserably. Why would an audience want to watch a rich, omnipotent corporate mogul endure public humiliation and incarceration, only to wind up watching a rich, omnipotent corporate mogul crow over the fact that she is even more successful because of her prison stint? While it may be an accurate picture of American "justice" as visited on the elite, it is hardly a good story.

So was it a complete waste of time? Not really--you can always learn a lot from a story done badly. And I got two more inches done on my knitting.