He's just another skeptic for her to turn around. Johnson's relationship to her second husband, played by the estimable Mahershala Ali, also gets short shrift, if only because the stakes of their courtship and marriage are not nearly as high as winning the space race. Vaughn and especially Jackson are not allotted nearly enough time to develop as discrete characters, so the best the film can manage is to run them up against the cardboard nemeses holding them back, like Kirsten Dunst as the condescending functionary who denies Vaughn a supervisory role.
Much like Johnson in the film, Hidden Figures isn't nearly as certain of itself when it's away from the chalkboard. Harrison doesn't advance Johnson out of a deep-seated belief in racial justice he does it because her gifts are self-evident and essential, and any obstacles to her are obstacles to him, too. It's touching simply to see them as colleagues, on equal footing, applying their passion and brilliance toward keeping the astronaut safe and advancing the space program. In these moments, Melfi doesn't have to elbow the audience to get them to pick up on the significance. The best scenes in Hidden Figures show Johnson and Harrison hard at work on hammering out the data for entry and re-entry that will support Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule as it orbits the earth and splash-lands in the Caribbean. One of these men is Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), the gum-chomping head of the Space Task Group, whose single-minded quest to get the numbers right leads naturally to an egalitarian leadership style. So begins a rinse-repeat pattern of slow-clap moments where the women are disrespected or underestimated at work, only to show up a parade of crew-cut dolts in dress shirts and thin black ties.
THE HIDDEN MOVIE SERIES
When they flash their credentials to a white cop who pulls them over, they're greeted with the first in a series of double takes. In the early '60s, she and her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), a mathematician who would later take over early IBM processing computers, and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), a trailblazer in engineering, are shown carpooling to NASA together in broken-down Chevy Impala. Henson plays Johnson as a quietly insistent woman who made herself so indispensable that her presence in otherwise all-white offices and high-level meetings could not be denied. Now 98, Johnson has lived long enough to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama and have a computational facility named after her at Langley. Vincent) makes a running joke out of Johnson having to dash a quarter-mile across campus in high heels just to use the "colored bathroom." It takes her boss a while to put an end to this unsustainable folly, and her colleagues' respect comes even slower still. When Katherine Johnson, an expert in analytic geometry, gets promoted to a position in the Space Task Group, co-writer/director Theodore Melfi ( St.
This wasn't a moral calculation so much as a practical one: America was losing the space race to the Russians, and NASA needed the best possible people to catch up, regardless of the color of their skin. In broad but mostly satisfying terms, Hidden Figures celebrates the few African-American women who broke out of the West Area Computers building because their talent was no longer worth suppressing. And it is about these human "colored computers" literally being hidden from view, tucked away in a segregated building on NASA's campus, a florescent-lit purgatory from which there was no path to deliverance. It is about the African-American women who carried out these vital functions in Langley, VA, without the public acknowledgement granted astronauts like Alan Shepard or John Glenn, or even the buzzcut white men at Mission Control. It is about the mathematics that served as a rationale and a backstop for manned space capsules launched into space and brought back safely to earth. Henson) and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) in Hidden Figures.īased on Margot Lee Shetterly's book, Hidden Figures has a triple-meaning title. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae, left), Katherine Johnson (Taraji P.
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