"The Way Things Are."

Rating: 6/10 (10 September 2017)

A necessary reminder of days gone by and why resentment still lingers. It's 1961 in one of those bureaucratic offices in the NASA research center at Langley, Virginia. Since it's 1961 in Virginia, all the facilities are segregated by law, including office buildings, rest rooms, and drinking fountains.
Well, there are about two dozen African-American ladies who are more than usually smart and serve as "computers" -- ie., human beings who do math by hand -- and their African-American supervisor is the cooperative and relatively restrained Olivia Spencer. Their immediate boss is the very polite, very Southern, very racist Kirsten Dunst, whose name means "haze" in German. (I just threw that in because I had to learn it in a painful German class and saw no reason why you shouldn't suffer a little too over the word. Now we both know, and you've paid the lesser price, believe me.)
Where was I? Yes, in 1961 NASA didn't even have the most elementary of technical facilities and these ladies are really math whizzes -- one especially, Taraji P. Henson, is even more knowing than the rest and is recruited by the director, Kevin Costner, into the sanctum sanctorum of the board room, which she enter boldly, where no "Negro" has gone before. The all-white male staff don't greet her. They simply stare in disbelief. Casting has made the right choices in all cases. None of the ladies is a glamour girl, although I wouldn't have minded Beyoncé in a prominent role, come to think of it.
Costner, however, is indifferent to the staff's response, just as he's indifferent to the indignities these human computers are suffering. As one of the ladies puts it, "He only thinks about numbers." So naturally when Costner chews out Henson for so often being out of the office, she shoots back with a couple of reasons why: the rest rooms in the building are segregated, and when she has to visit the bathroom she must run to the nearest colored bathroom in a building a quarter of a mile away, rain or shine. Costner take a crowbar to the "Whites Only" bathroom and demolishes it. The Russians are ahead of us in the space race, so let's not leave our desks any more than we have to, and by the way, let's work late without pay. And no more of this racist stuff.
The film goes on to trumpet the very real talents and achievements of Taraji Henson and the rest, along with all the indignities imposed on them. For many Americans, the indignities are the stuff of history but it wasn't all that long ago. I remember hitch-hiking north on US 40 and encountering colored and white rest rooms at all the stops, well into Maryland. We needed this reminder. That kind of "racist stuff" is behind us now, thank God, but the sentiments persist in some quarters.
Therein lies the chief problem with this movie. I'll have to shed my PC mantle for a few minutes. The movie is buffed to a high sheen. The whites are all either prejudiced or, at best, sullen or indifferent, with John Glenn a notable exception. The blacks are uniformly good -- indignant but well behaved, except for one or two thoroughly justified outbursts that are necessary to capture the attention of the white guys. The story lacks subtlety. And further I don't need to be preached to or taught a lesson because I'm already a member of the choir.
The few scenes that are nuanced stand out like a gastropod on its poduncle. Here's one such scene. Towards the end, when the ladies have proved their value, Olivia Spencer and her nemesis Kirsten Dunst find themselves alone in the now-integrated ladies' room. Dunst approaches the ever-smiling Spencer and assures her that she, Dunst, is not really prejudiced against black, regardless of what Spencer might think, "please believe me." Still smiling politely, Spencer replies, "Yes. I really believe that you think that." How desperately the movie needs more such scenes.
There's another irritating weakness too. A lot of time is given over to Tararji Henson's budding romance and ultimate marriage to a black colonel in the U.S. Army. It's all there -- the widowhood, the four charming children, the occasional misunderstanding, the declamation of undying love, the transfer of the mother's wedding ring at the birthday party, the tears of happiness. My God, it's Lifetime Movie Network!
I've now gotten the bad stuff out of the way and can say that the movie is well worth watching for any number of reasons. Math wizards are always fascinating anyway. It's a special talent that shows up early in childhood and is later heavily impacted by training, so it's hard to separate the inherited talent from the knowledge picked up in a calculus class. It's not a talent measured on any of the most commonly used intelligence tests, which dismiss it as a mere "aptitude", like musical ability. Shame on the psychometrists.
Anyway, you won't regret seeing it.