Hidden Figures: An Inspirational True Story
Rated PG
Hidden Figures is a new film from director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent). It is an inspiring drama about a team of African-American female computers who worked for NASA in the 1960’s. It is a particularly well-made film in that it meticulously balances the weight of a civil rights era film with a sidecar of female empowerment, yet still manages to be light-hearted, funny, and enjoyable.
Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and TV’s Empire) stars as Katherine Johnson, a widowed mother of three girls and a mathematical genius. In the 1960s, Katherine, an African American, lived in Virginia, a state that still largely practiced segregation at the time, yet she held a very important job at NASA. Her situation was unique, but not unheard of, as there were at least a dozen other African American women working at NASA along with her. Katherine’s close friend and eventual supervisor was a woman named Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer of The Help and Fruitvale Station), and she worked alongside another of her close friends, an aspiring engineer named Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae of Moonlight and Rio 2).
The film opens with a scene in which Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary find themselves broken down on the side of the road while they should be on their way to work. With Dorothy’s mechanical skills, the trio manage to get to work on time, impressing a white male cop who pulls over to inquire into their activity, and they begin their day as NASA computers—a term used for low-level number crunchers. Soon, Katherine is called up to work on a team of fellow mathematical geniuses working directly for the head of Virginia’s space program, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner of Criminal and Man of Steel). Likewise, Mary is called upon to assist the engineers struggling to design a spaceship that can withstand the pressure of flying through space and Dorothy continues to seamlessly run her department as the supervisor, yet not being given the title or pay of supervisor.
Throughout Hidden Figures, viewers are shown a balance of the lives these women lived at work and the lives they lived during their free time. In addition to being NASA employees and working long hours helping the United States in the race to get to the moon, each of the three women were mothers, friends, and churchgoers, among other roles. They struggled daily with the lack of civil rights including times when Mary had to petition a judge to allow her to attend night classes at an all-white high school just so she could apply to be an engineer at NASA and when Dorothy was forced to leave the public library along with her sons after she wandered into the whites-only section. Perhaps the most memorable of these instances were the multiple times each day that Katherine had to walk more than a mile and a half across NASA’s campus in order to use the only female bathroom for colored women. Each small victory that the women earn, both at work and in their personal lives, is one of the many small, beautiful moments in the film that make viewers not just smile, but vocally cheer for their success.
Henson, Monae, and Spencer each give inspiring and beautiful performances in Hidden Figures. They represent real women who broke multiple barriers to achieve their dreams and they do it with grace and finesse. Costner, too, gives a stellar performance. The supporting cast is anchored by Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man and Melancholia) as a condescending supervisor and Jim Parsons (Garden State and TV’s The Big Bang Theory) as a skeptical co-worker.