Excellent, beautifully acted and thought-provoking

Rating: 9/10 (16 March 2017)

In "Hidden Figures" we have a case of a book only just predating the film thereof (both are from 2016). Bearing in mind the huge story here, this can come as no real surprise ... unlike the "dynamite" content - entirely unknown to just about all of us, I suspect, devotees of NASA missions as we may have been. Author Margot Lee Shetterly is a "child of NASA" (born 1969), as her dad worked there, while her mother lectured at Hampton, and so she is steeped in the tradition and has her point to make.
It needs making (just as the similar point in "The Butler" from 2013 needed making).
And so to Theodore Melfi's film, in which the abiding image is of some of the 1961 rooms at Langley, Virginia, being full of almost clone-like white guys in white shirts and ties and badges (the kind I dreamed of being when growing up); while others are full of colourfully-attired women whose skin is black. Like everything else in the then Virginia, this is segregated, and these visuals achieve much before we even get to the dialogue and plot.
Some movement between the two sets of rooms (separated by hundreds of yards) is now beginning, thanks to our story's three (real-life) heroes Katherine Goble (the former child prodigy but now widowed mother of 3 number-cruncher or "computer"); Dorothy Vaughan (a fellow "computer", who supervises the others but is unable to gain official recognition of the fact, and who also takes an interest in Fortran (invented 1957), as well as the new IBMs that have just reached NASA); and Mary Jackson (another "computer" who wants to break new ground in all directions by becoming an engineer).
These three characters are played, respectively, by Taraji Henson, the Oscar-nominated Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, and it's fair to say they act their hearts out, impressing as not-nerdy-at-all scientific and engineering types. The portrayals are a warm, touching, impressive, amusing delight.
Over on "the white side", our players include Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons and Kevin Costner - as Vivian Mitchell, Paul Stafford and Al Harrison, respectively. There's also a tiny-but-key role for Olek Krupa as Karl Zielinski (real-life Kazimierz Czarnecki), who has a superb line to deliver about being "a Polish Jew", and escapee of the Holocaust. He is among the "bridge-builders" and stereotype-breakers, as - ultimately - is Costner, who (again) takes to a 1960s role as if made for it. Harrison is a sympathetic figure, even if he effectively tells his staff to abandon family life for the duration (the upcoming mission being John Glenn's "Friendship 7" flight of February 1962).
Mitchell and Stafford are stiff, mostly unyielding characters, and - appropriately - Jim Parsons does not quite leave Sheldon Cooper behind. In fact, even these "progress" gradually. Anyway, they are not obviously evil, but they are remarkably ready to accept the obscenity-absurdity of Katherine having to run to the "coloured" toilet back in her original place of work, and to use a separate kettle. Doubtless, these are Americans who share their country's strong Christian tradition, but forget how all men are brothers in the eyes of the Lord; and who of course believe in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", yet are prepared to live in a system that forgets that too.
Those are powerful, unsettling, Orwellian thoughts.
Tellingly, when Harrison begins to break down the barriers (even literally, in a scene whose historical accuracy one somewhat doubts), it is not because he's seen the light, but simply, pragmatically, because it's going to be more efficient in helping get the job done. Perhaps that's an OK reason, given the sheer bizarre stupidity of what they've become stuck with.
Thanks to changes that Harrison and others made at NASA, and thanks to the mostly well-sensed and portrayed patriotic and scientific success that Glenn's flight (and then the Apollo missions) represented, the film is "feelgood" - and all the more so with the typical end-of-biopic comparisons of acted and real-life versions, complete with short biographical notes. Katherine is romanced successfully by Korea veteran Col. Jim Johnson (played by Mahershala Ali, with his usual integrity and dignity). Johnson reveals that his parents had been married 52 years, but we learn at the end that Katherine's own marriage had reached 59 years, and that she received various honours ... from Pres. Obama ... in 2015/2016.
Each snippet here is telling.
Which brings me to a further key thought I found myself thinking, though I do not know if it was what the makers intended. Triumphant as the film may be, it was not plain sailing after 1961, was it? With - literally - one exception, the black people portrayed in "Hidden Figures" are mostly free of the disillusionment-cum-surliness they might rightly feel. They are wearily accepting, but also hard-working, patriotic and middle-class-aspiring, "normal", and as devotedly interested in space as their white counterparts, and of course (more than) a match for them in intellect and ability, if not opportunity.
This somehow suggests that everything was still to play for in 1961 - an era perhaps looking "nicer than ours", even if saddled with that outrageous and hideous segregation.
I found myself encouraged to imagine steps seen in the film being taken more fully, firmly and quickly, more widely. To imagine more white people like Harrison bringing down barriers (even for just pragmatic reasons).
Had those things happened, might America not have avoided decades more of not-dissipating African-American bitterness, resentfulness, ghettoisation, anger, crime, drugs and imprisonment?
Maybe not, but maybe yes...
That's a surprising take-home message from such a fine, often enjoyable and mostly inspiring film, but it's certainly one I got...