A Winning Film about Maths, Black Women and the Right Stuff

Rating: 8/10 (18 February 2017)

If you're going to make a film that honours the contribution of people to rational hard science, you have to respect hard science, and one sure thing is that it has always been global, and that engineers and scientists have always found it at least necessary to pay proper due to those who achieve in their field. Of course newcomers have always invited derision, but those who succeed win the approbation their peers.
Thus NASA became a social opinion leader as well an engineering pioneer, and even in Langley, Virginia, where segregation was a way of life, winning the Cold War demanded full, effective participation and utilisation of the available talent, as any economist would endorse.
The biggest negative with this film - and this portrayal was as accurate and intended as the cinematography and corridor shots that deliver it - is that it reminded me too much of the worst side of being at work, where people hold themselves still and aloof, seldom say what they think about you, especially to your face, and create lots of alienated tension.
The other side of work is that, as relationships develop and trust builds, people do break this down and even mathematicians can learn to enjoy each other's company - outside of work, even. Unfortunately we don't see this in Hidden Figures at all: the 3 black women come to the film in a delightful, but fully-developed, socially-dependent relationship, we see none of it at all from the white people, and over the course of two hours nothing develops. The closest it gets is when Octavia Spencer rebuffs the hopelessly stilted Kirsten Dunst's approach of, roughly, 'despite what you think I do see things from your point of view' with 'I know you think you do.' There is no prospect of release from the remorseless imperatives of employment, and certainly no hope for humanity here! How about some real human stories, then? Did the Civil Rights movement and the promise of a modern rational society really spring from an animal that behaves like this? Could neither faction FEEL what it's like to be trapped in being the other? When one is cut will the other never bleed, nor when one tickles will the other never laugh? I find the cold consequences of a life like this render the gains of the oppressed frankly futile, and whilst the stories of the women are momentarily uplifting, they seem destined to be dashed by the failure of all to imagine what it is to be a whole society. Thus we have darkness at midday, and I wanted to implore our mathematicians to 'think we are already there,' too, as Costner implores Taraji Henson to do about the Moon.
We also have Costner's motivational speech on why the US is coming second in a race with two competitors. Since they're not smarter than us, and they don't want it more than us, we mustn't be working hard enough. Now that's a great starting point for a plot development in the world of science and engineering but, in the best traditions of Redneck America, it's just taken as a given. After all, whilst there probably is a direct, if not linear relationship, within quite wide limits, between desk hours and achievement for a human computer, the same does not hold true for an applied mathematician seeking the new insights Costner is imploring. Thinking creatively to find new methods, new approaches and new solutions does not necessarily require the cancellation of home life and, ironically, that is perhaps the problem any insurgent workgroup has in making real inroads into the incumbent dominant class - finding the recreational space to develop ideas. Burlington Burtie plays at maths and has insights in the bath, whilst the oppressed are too often too tired, working to survive, or to save us from the Commie threat, to think much at all.
Actually, it turns out that the solution to coming first in the Cold War was about freedom to be diverse, and think, interact and act, the freedom that allowed Thomas J Watson Jnr to develop IBM into a great computer, that encouraged Noyce, Moore and the modern entrepreneurs to express their exuberance in ever more valuable components, and that motivated graduates and their professors in their thousands to think a thousand thoughts around every open challenge. So it's a pity that we couldn't have Janelle Monáe delivering an inspirational soliloquy rather than just the rhetorical devices she uses on the Judge to persuade him to let her go to engineer night-school, and rather than the white man leader who does declaim all the idea fertilisation.
In short, dear filmmaker, make your characters CONNECT with each other so that your audience can follow their journey and connect with them.
Also, every minute of run time over 90 needs justifying, and there isn't enough to say about Euler's method and the elliptical to parabolic transition to justify all the extra 35 here, which unnecessarily left some of my party seeing themselves already at the exits. Convincing the Western masses that maths is a chat topic is tough enough anyway, without pushing it.
And where were the white women? Women have always made excellent computers and computer programmers, and they were not absent from NASA. This audience mostly doesn't know who Grace Hopper was either.
But having got all that out of the way, Hidden Figures is (and are) revelatory, charming, often slick, crowd-pleasing and profitable so, for all that could be improved, this is rightly a winner.