Hidden Figures Exposes Unsung American Heroes

Rating: 9/10 (15 January 2017)

"Hidden Figures", directed by Theodore Malfi and based on the book of the same name, is a historical drama highlighting the struggles and accomplishments of three African American women who were employed by the NASA space program in the 1960s. The social backdrop of the narrative takes place early in the Kennedy administration, and Jim Crow laws and customs still dominated most of the United States—even in (federal) government employment, discrimination was still the standard, as the Langley Virginia NASA campus had separate work facilities (and bathroom facilities) for white and black employers. Octavia Spencer is Dorothy Vaughan: she leads a team of numbers-crunchers who contribute to the math-heavy physics and engineering problems that NASA is trying to solve in order to compete with the Soviet Union in space exploration. Taraji Henson is Katherine Johnson, who gets a promotion of sorts to work with the all-white team under Kevin Costner's gruff but fair Al Harrison. She's a backup calculator to Jim Parson's Paul Stafford (a kind of vaguely less grating version of his Sheldon character on Big Bang Theory). Janelle Monae is Mary Jackson, who pines for an engineer's role, but finds herself stymied by the racism of administrators who seemingly invent new hoops for her to jump through.
An intriguing subplot involves an early-generation IBM computer being installed on the campus: back then, a mechanical computer literally took up an entire room—but once installed, no one seems to know what to do with it—which Dorothy takes as her cue to learn Fortran and teach it to her charges. All the ladies have children, and are churchgoers. The film wisely shows the family interactions, and the warm relationships therein, in stark contrast to the predominately white work environment at NASA, where condescending managers take their black workers for granted. The film eschews any outright vicious depictions of racial confrontations and the oppression of the era. A police encounter is treated with comic effect, as is one of the ladies browsing in the "White" area of a library. The "n-word" is never used by anyone. Most of the adversaries aren't broadly drawn. The most tension in the film is reflected in a compelling monologue by Henson when her character is confronted about her lengthy bathroom breaks. Overall, this is a feel good movie, and gives due respect to a trio of Americans who contributed greatly to the sciences and who were . Astronauts like John Glenn (here played by Glen Powell) got to be the face of NASA to most of the public and the world. There were legitimately hundreds of employees of other kinds whose work was unheralded—but due in great part to the racial discrimination of the era they survived in, "erasure" threatened to marginalize the accomplishments of Katherine, Mary and Dorothy. "Hidden Figures" makes sure that no one forgets their names again.