Hidden Figures [Review by Haus]

Hidden Figures tells the story of three black women working at NASA’s Langley Research Center in early 1960s Virginia. It’s a deliberately heartwarming story of back-room genius in the first light of the space race and the last gasp of the Jim Crow south. It’s a predictable picture in many ways, but one that tells a valuable and true story through solid, grounded performances and one I suggest you see.

Taraji P. Henson leads as Katherine Johnson, a math prodigy who’s assigned to help crunch the launch and splashdown trajectories for John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission. She struggles not only with math that “hasn’t been invented yet” but also with a separate-but-unequal coffee pot and the need to hustle across campus every day to use a colored women’s bathroom.

Octavia Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan, the de facto supervisor and matriarch to a group of “colored computers” (reality check: Some 37 years before the first orange iMac, this term meant black human beings who did math). She and her team face obsolescence as a room-scale IBM tape-and-punch-card juggernaut with the computing power of a Hatchimal slowly coughs to life next door.

Rounding out the trio is Janelle Monae, who plays Mary Jackson — another NASA employee and would-be engineer who’s unable to take the required courses she needs to progress because they’re offered only in a white school.

All three actors are excellent. (Monae is particularly watchable as the sparky youngster of the group.) But aside from the occasional car ride and social visit, the three ladies spend most of the film apart.

Henson plays Johnson (who’s alive and 97, having recently been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) as a genuine math nerd who’s also reserved, composed, and resolute. Her raw talent eventually beams through the cracks of systemic and unquestioned roadblocks of the segregation-era South, as we know it must. But it’s played very cool: One statue-courting outburst aside, Henson keeps the storm brewing just beneath the surface, suffering quietly until the audience practically begs for a rational hand to set all this nonsense straight.

That hand is attached to Kevin Costner, who’s seemingly been in cryo-sleep for the past decade (not counting a couple quick bids as Superman’s dad) and pops back on the scene pretty much as I remember him in The Guardian and everything else he’s ever done. His Al Harrison is the boss of NASA’s space mathlete squad and a stoic and honest no-nonsense kind of guy. He unilaterally abolishes segregated bathrooms at NASA with a sledgehammer when he learns what’s keeping his star “computer” away from her desk. (One wonders if this actually happened, but we’ll need to read Margot Lee Shetterly’s book to find out.) This character, mind you, evidently had no particular problem with segregation at NASA until it delayed his calculations a few precious minutes.

And that’s one of the few problems I had with Hidden Figures. By focusing on such admittedly extraordinary people, we’re given no choice but to accept that they simply must be made full participants at NASA or risk losing the Space Race. But the idea that you can merit-badge your way to equality–or that you need to be a certified genius and math savant who runs circles around her coworkers to earn the right to drink from the same coffee pot–isn’t especially useful to the many mere mortals who suffer equally under repressive mores. Good thing, then, that these three (and others like them) paved that way.

Of course, NASA is the ultimate publicity pyramid–beneath every astronaut’s megawatt smile heaves a huge writhing mass of hidden figures, the countless brains and hands and arms that cooked up and worked out the many missions. That was true then and it’s true today. And in a way, this movie is as much a nod to all that intellectual bedrock as it is to its central trio.

The civil rights backdrop is pervasive, but largely limited to the social frictions of segregationist etiquette. Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons supply the requisite backward white contingent who wield shrugs and inertia to keep the protagonists in their place; Glen Powell (brilliant as Finnegan in Everybody Wants Some!!) nails a charismatic and gee-whiz portrayal of the late great John Glenn, a natural gladhander who, like Costner, appreciates talent above all else. Mahershala Ali portrays Col. Jim Johnson, a Hallmark-grade perfect guy who woos Taraji P. Henson’s protagonist.

If it all seems a bit too perfect, that’s perhaps the point. Hidden Figures is hardly a warts-and-all biopic, and it’s not supposed to be. It could have been a mess of sentimental schmaltz (as I suspect it was envisioned by director Theodore Melfi, whose previous effort was the sickly-sweet Bill Murray vehicle, St. Vincent) but the honest performances keep it on track. It comes out somewhere just north of just right, where north, here, is “squeaky clean and feel-goody.” A minor quibble. This is a good movie.

Haus Verdict: A worthwhile, inspiring, and entertaining true story of three black women at NASA at the start of the space race. Could have been simple fluff, but strong performances ensure that it’s not. See it. 

Hidden Figures opened December 25.

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