Movie Review: "Hidden Figures"

"Hidden Figures": B+.  1961 was a pivotal year in American history.  I graduated from eighth grade.  John F. Kennedy began his ill-fated term as the first Catholic elected President of the United States.  Seven years after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs The Board Of Education, which ruled that school districts structured on a "separate but equal" basis did not pass constitutional muster, America was still a racially divided country.   Segregation was evident in pockets throughout the country, most blatantly in the South.  It would be three more years before Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act.  In 1961 the Cold War was exacerbated by the construction of the Berlin Wall.  A subset of the Cold War was the Space Race, which the Soviets appeared to win on April 12, 1961, when they sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into outer space.

That is the setting for Hidden Figures, a film based on the true story of three black friends who worked for NASA.  Katherine (Taraji P. Henson) is a math wizard for whom no abstract equation is too difficult to solve.  Mary (singer Janelle Monae, sporting a fluffy hairdo that must be the envy of the current Minneapolis mayor) is an aspiring engineer.  Dorothy (Octavia Spencer), who is a little older, is the manager of the pool of mathematicians, all black females including Katherine and Mary, on the remote West Campus of the NASA property in Hampton, Virginia.  Even though the NASA operation is a federal entity, the racism within its walls is flagrant.  There are "colored" bathrooms, "colored" computing rooms,and even a "colored" coffee pot which one of Katherine's co-workers labels on the second day of her new assignment.  When she first showed up the day before, someone rudely handed her a full wastepaper basket, mistakenly thinking she was a custodian.  Dorothy's manager, Ms. Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst), refuses to promote her to Supervisor, even though she is clearly doing the work of a Supervisor.  "That's just how it's done around here," Mitchell declares.  Mary faces hurdles too, needing to convince a judge for permission to take courses at an all white school in order to get started on her desired career.
 

The Soviet launching of Gagarin is the proverbial punch in the gut to the American space program.  The Russian cosmonaut not only became mankind's first spaceman, he also orbited the earth.  At that point, the US had not even attempted a sub-orbital mission.  Enter Katherine, the only black and one of the very few women to join Al Harrison's team of mathematicians and engineers.  The research team is charged with, among other things, coming up with the calculations to get the astronauts of America's nascent Mercury Program into space, and back.  After the frustrated Harrison (Kevin Costner) informs his underlings that they have just finished second in a two-country race, he announces that they will double down, working even longer and harder.  The Soviets may have beaten the US into space, but the Yanks can still win the race to the moon.
 

Although Hidden Figures tracks all three friends, it is Katherine's story.  She proves invaluable to the Mercury Program, but it is a struggle, not only because of her skin color but because of her gender.  She doesn't get credit for her work.  She initially is kept out of key planning sessions, ostensibly because she does not have security clearance.   The nearest women's bathroom for blacks is a half-mile away.  She has to work twice as hard as anyone on Harrison's team.  But in a room full of math wizards and wonks, she is the best and the brightest, virtues that do not go unnoticed by astronaut John Glenn or, eventually, the gruff Harrison.
 

We weren't a quarter of the way through the story when it became apparent that Hidden Figures should be compared to Sully (reviewed here December 13, 2016; B-).  Both films are based on true stories involving a hero who, against the odds, averts disaster.  In Sully, the pilot is forced to land his commercial flight in the Hudson River.  His skill as a pilot is the difference between life and death for over 150 people on board.  In Hidden Figures, the mathematical genius of Katherine comes into play several times, particularly when Harrison's group is trying to establish the best maneuvers to enable Glenn to breach orbit earlier than planned and return to Earth.  In what may be Hollywood license, Glenn even asks Harrison to ask Katherine to confirm the calculations of Harrison's group, even though at that moment she had already been reassigned.  There is no margin for error. Miscalculation will likely result in Glenn's capsule, with its iffy heat shield, burning up upon re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.

My main problem with Sully is that the depiction of the NTSB members was way too heavy handed. Each of the people on the panel was made to look extremely foolish, if not stupid, in the manner in which they interrogated Sullivan and conducted their investigation.  It is very hard to believe there wasn't one single NTSB member who went to bat for Sully.  Does Hidden Figures pass the Sully Test?  Not really.  We realize that Virginia was once a Confederate state and that racism remained a huge problem in 1961.  Still, was there not more than one compassionate white person who interacted with any of the three principal black females?  That one person was a Virginia Highway Patrol officer who, at first, appears to be ready to issue citations to the trio on the roadside, but who ends up doing something unexpectedly nice.
 

Why does Hidden Figures deserve a higher rating than Sully?  Here are two reasons.  Tom Hanks was his usual excellent self in the former, but Henson as Katherine is too precious a performance to take for granted.  I love the way she occasionally pushes her glasses up her nose, just as Katherine did as a little girl.  And what about when she has to jog to the remote West Campus restroom, taking baby steps in her high heels while toting several thick files?  An indelible vision.  Secondly, the dialogue between Katherine and her love interest, Marine Officer Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali) is clever, as is the exchange between Dorothy and the cop referred to above.  I don't recall any cleverness in the more straight-forward Sully script.
 

Unlike Sullivan's river landing, the story of Hidden Figures reveals a background to the successful Mercury Program which heretofore was under wraps.  We knew from history and the media that the flights of the first three American astronauts, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and Glenn, were successful, but we did not know about the contributions of the three black women. The US may never have put men on the moon, or even sent astronauts into orbit around the Earth, without Dorothy and especially Katherine.  In fact, even sub-orbital flights may have never been achieved.  Katherine was born to be a hero.  Harrison said he needed the people in his group not only to solve equations but to "look beyond the numbers."  Katherine was the only one who answered the call.  Finally, in case you're wondering, yes, I wrote that gratuitous second sentence merely to see if you are paying attention.