‘Nappily Ever After’ Continues Netflix’s Comedy Hot Streak

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What to Stream This Weekend

MOVIE: Nappily Ever After
DIRECTOR: Haifaa Al-Mansour
CAST: Sanaa Lathan, Ricky Whittle, Lynn Whitfield
AVAILABLE ON: Netflix

Perhaps the biggest success story for Netflix thus far in 2018 has been the resurgence of the romantic comedy under their banner. Finding unusual popular success with films like Set It Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before has given Netflix’s original movies a foothold they haven’t had up until now. Haifaa Al-Mansour’s adaptation of Trisha R. Thomas’s novel Nappily Ever After continues the platform’s streak with rom-com success, though this one a bit less fizzy and a bit more substantial.

Violet (Sanaa Lathan) is a successful woman, with the right job (advertising; it’s always in advertising) and the right man (Ricky Whittle, making the most of his hiatus between American Gods seasons) and the right house and a seemingly perfect life. Much of the reason she’s gotten this life has been the strict, image-focused upbringing by her mother (Lynn Whitfield, earning her Lifetime Achievement Award for playing strict, image-focused mothers), whose pet peeves included natural, nappy black-women’s hair. Violet was at the mercy of the hot comb, the straightener, the weave, and the wig since she was a child, and she’s feared the humidity, the rain, or god forbid pools ever since.

Just from the setup you have a strong sense of where the story is going to go — as is the case with most romantic comedies — especially when she encounters a salt-of-the-earth single father, Will (Lyriq Bent), who runs a hair salon and doesn’t burden his daughter with shame about her natural hair. But Nappily Ever After is as much about a black woman claiming her sense of self as it is about any him-or-him romantic considerations. We’ve seen movies and read columns about the cultural significance of black women’s hair, from Chris Rock’s Good Hair documentary to the way that Ava DuVernay threaded a telling piece of characterization into A Wrinkle in Time via her main character’s unruly hair. Nappily Ever After centers that cultural significance and has it double as Violet’s self-actualization. In the first half, she migrates from hair disaster to hair disaster, and the more she tries to damage control, the more frayed her nerves (and ends) get. By the time she’s had enough and shaves her poor, overworked hair completely off, Al-Mansour films it as nothing short of a ritual cleansing. Violet is shedding all her baggage and starting from a place of pure self.

If this all makes Nappily Ever After sound more like an OWN series on self-improvement and less like a frothy rom-com, that’s maybe a little right. But there’s lots of lightness and love her. Violet’s relationship with her mother, dark and stormy as it is, is leavened by a side story with her father (Ernie Hudson) who’s taken up a late-in-life career as an underwear model (just go with it, its worth it). And Violet’s burgeoning relationship with Will is only enhanced by her relationship with his daughter, Zoe (Daria Johns).

In the end, it’s Lathan’s show, and she carries it strongly, playing Violet’s self-doubt and perfectionism as a symptom, not the disease. It’s very easy to root for her. (And the final scenes of the film include the kind of everybody-be-happy rom-com ending we should get in more movies of this ilk.)

Stream Nappily Ever After on Netflix