Last year, the director Kasi Lemmons did something interesting, if not consistently successful, with the character of Harriet Tubman: She turned her into a modern action hero. Lemmons’s film “Harri…
female millionaire — after experiencing herself the transformational power of hair regrowth. Sarah’s life is changed by Addie , an industrious maker of balms and a figure who tries to over-prove her case: Addie’s products truly work to fix patchy or broken hair, and yet Addie, born with lighter skin and long, loose curls because of her mixed race, insists on marketing them as if they will generate hair of an entirely different texture.
The show can be credited, then, with pushing toward complicated and often-painful matters of prejudice on the basis of skin color and hair texture from its earliest moments; it deserves mention, too, for the ways in which Spencer combines a modern-minded understanding of her worth and her capabilities as a budding businesswoman with her expression of simple ecstasy as Ejogo massages her scalp.
The show loses momentum as its protagonist’s career gains it; it puts forward issues in her life like her husband’s philandering and her daughter’s attraction to women without always having much to say about them beyond a somewhat basic communication that Sarah could stand up for herself, or that she was tolerant. But its reverence towards Walker isn’t matched by stodgy storytelling; it finds in moments a briskness and charge that might elude a more straightforwardly told period drama.
This contemporaneity bears other fruits, too. Elsewhere, a scene in which Madam C.J. and her daughter visit Harlem bursts with curiosity, with visual grandeur and plainspoken excitement to be there. The camera toggles from person to person, as if trying to take in all at once a cityscape in which black people are not just economically liberated but free in every sense. It feels less like a vacation for Madam C.J. than like a utopia.
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