Race and the space race

Rating: 8/10 (22 February 2017)

So soon after JACKIE we're back to the Kennedy era again, with this uplifting tale that puts a shaded meaning on the 'race' element of the Space Race. HIDDEN FIGURES – the title is a clever pun – is the story of three African-American women whose mathematical brilliance made a vital contribution to the effort to catch up with the Russians who'd rocketed the first man out of Earth's atmosphere.
The women were called 'human computers' – we later see the installation of the clunky great IBM machine that would take over much of the laborious number-crunching these workers performed. The movie goes out of its way to show how tough black women's lives were in the workplace: 'colored' toilets, restricted prospects for advancement and constant daily humiliations from white co-workers (one of them is given her own coffee dispenser next to the one the white staff use). Writer/director Theodore Melfi shows us their home lives too, which are surprisingly similar to the lives of white folk. The number-crunching sequences are executed crisply enough not to overwhelm the audience with mathematics.
The script perhaps slightly over-eggs the three women's vicissitudes to heighten the drama, but the three actresses (Taraji Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe) give rock-solid performances with very few moments of 'grandstanding'. Kevin Costner is similarly 'solid' as the head of the Space Research Division.
This is another film, like last month's LION, that's bursting with the 'feel-good factor'. The feel-good factor is something HIDDEN FIGURES (if you'll excuse another very un-PC pun) delivers in spades.