Octavia Spencer stars as Sarah Walker, a daughter of former slaves who built a business empire a century ago by helping black women take care of their hair. The title of the Netflix mini-series “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C. J. Walker” indicates that the facts of the life of Sarah Walker, a pioneering African-American businesswoman, will not be strictly adhered to.
Then there’s the other meaning: that we are to be inspired by Walker’s story. And inspiration is what the show is peddling, the way Walker sold shampoos and pomades. It does its job with some of the shrewdness and panache Walker demonstrated in building her hair-care empire. And it employs a fine cast in telling her amazing story, beginning with Octavia Spencer as Walker, the girl born (as Sarah Breedlove) to former slaves just after emancipation and who became the richest self-made American woman of her time.
What it doesn’t do, across four episodes and 190 minutes (available Friday), is give a very strong idea of who Walker was or how she accomplished what she did. “Self Made” sticks to Walker’s adult life, beginning in St. Louis in 1908, where the stress of working as a washerwoman and living with an angry drunk who hits her and calls her a mangy dog makes her hair start to fall out. When the gorgeous Addie Munroe (Carmen Ejogo) comes to Walker’s door selling her line of hair products, Walker sees a way out and goes to work for Munroe.
Soon she’s replicating Munroe’s formula and starting her own company, which will eventually be called the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Co. after her third husband (played by Blair Underwood).
The cultural and symbolic weight of black women’s hair is touched on, but not dwelt on, in “Self Made. ” (A dizzying array of hair and hairdos are on display, overseen by the hair director, Etheline Joseph. ) What the writers Nicole Jefferson Asher and Elle Johnson (working from a biography by Walker’s great-great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles) and the directors Kasi Lemmons and DeMane Davis have gone for is good old-fashioned entertainment, with a few tears when Walker’s fortunes turn down and a few cheers when her uncommon determination carries the day. Unfortunately, the inspiration inherent in Walker’s story is in short supply in the script.
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Some familiar with Walker may complain about the elisions that have been made — the peripatetic history of her business has been drastically condensed, and not much screen time is given to her philanthropy or social work. But the bigger problem is what’s there on the screen. The plot lines that have been emphasized, or entirely cooked up, for the sake of juicing the drama — a threatening pimp named Sweetness (Bill Bellamy); a lesbian affair for Walker’s daughter, Lelia (Tiffany Haddish); the wounded pride and unfaithfulness of C.
“J.”
Walker — are hackneyed and dull. And the dialogue, for the most part, just sits on the page. When Walker expresses her excitement about her expanding business to W. E.
B. Du Bois (Cornelius Smith Jr. ), the best the script can manage is, “I feel like I’m living a dream. ” To give the series some extra style, the filmmakers provide occasional scenes with a Brechtian flourish, in which Walker’s take on events is embodied by a line of tap-dancing waitresses or a team of “Walker Girls” (an African-American analogue to the Gibson Girl) on bicycles.
These are mostly harmless, although one in which the rivalry between Walker and Munroe is dramatized by putting Spencer and Ejogo in a boxing ring and having them mime a fight is pretty cringey. These choreographed interludes may provide a clue to the overall presentation of “Self Made”: It plays a lot like a draft for a Broadway musical, and there’s no doubt that Walker’s story could be turned into a great one. (It’s too bad that the title “Hair! ” is already taken.
) The subplots are made for the stage — Sweetness seems to have been conceived with a libretto of “Porgy and Bess” open to Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So. ” Some of the speeches Walker is given could easily be songs; one even begins with a few notes of music that make you think Spencer might be about to sing. (In the current fashion, the series, although it’s a straightforward, costumed period piece, uses contemporary songs, and it employs snippets from tunes like Santigold’s “Creator” or Diana Gordon’s “Woman” in surprisingly obvious ways. When a few notes of a blues classic, “St.
James Infirmary,” are heard, they’re introducing a funeral. Not heard, unless I missed it: Helen Humes’s “Nappy Headed Blues,” with its direct reference to Walker and its great opening line, “My hair is can’t you don’t you, you can’t comb it, don’t you try. ”) Spencer’s intelligent, restrained performance is faultless but a little dry — with the exception of one early scene in which the tyranny of light skin and straight hair bring Walker to tears, she doesn’t really grab us. Ejogo, on the other hand, is fully alive as the O.
M. G. (original mean girl) Munroe, hiding her venom in honey and chasing Walker around the country seeking justice for her stolen formula. Underwood, Kevin Carroll (as Walker’s lawyer) and Haddish are all good, though Haddish doesn’t for a moment seem like someone living in the early 20th century.
Ejogo’s moving performance comes despite the script’s refashioning of Walker’s real-life rival Annie Malone — whose entrepreneurial success was nearly equal to Walker’s — into a sad and scheming character who at one point can’t pay her butler his wages. Apparently the laws of melodrama required that in order to raise up and finally tell the story of one black woman, another had to be put down.
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