The Space Race was, for many, a defining time in our nation’s history. The quest of both science and patriotism to get brave men into metal objects and shoot them into space and back was seen as an accomplishment both of technology and getting ahead of the commies.
The movie Hidden Figures takes a look at three lesser known figures from that period, namely a trio of African American female mathematicians.
Most of the movie is focused on Katherine (Taraji P. Henson), a mostly quiet, bespectacled math genius. The audience first sees her as a small girl skipping a few grades in 1926 due to her proficiency in all things math. The movie then skips to 1961 where Katherine and her two friends Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) and Mary (Janelle Monae) are late for work because Dorothy’s car has broken down on the side of the road. Where do they work? NASA. What do they do? They work out of the West Lab from NASA’s Langley, Virginia campus with a number of other African American women. They do a lot of math work while NASA tries to get an IBM computer installed. Most of the work seems to be done first in the much nicer East Lab.
From there, the story follows the three women as they work to get ahead in a society that’s not only racist, but sexist too. Katherine, the widowed mother of three girls, goes to work in a number crunching room directly under the head of Space Task Group, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Mary is trying to get into an engineering program, but needs to take some advanced math classes at a local all-white high school to accomplish this. Dorothy, meanwhile, sees the writing on the wall for her whole department when she spots the computer coming in and makes an effort to teach herself computer programming while also trying to finally nail down a supervisor’s position since she’s already doing all the work of a supervisor without the title, pay, or job security.
As it is, the film is actually a bit more subtle than most on the subject of racism. Few if any characters in the course of the movie are obvious racists the way that many movies display such characters. There isn’t exactly anyone hanging around with Klan robes hanging somewhere in a closet. No, the racism depicted, and this is to the movie’s credit, is more of the institutional/casual variety, and not someone calling anyone the n-word. The closest the movie has to human villains are characters played by Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons. Dunst’s character doesn’t believe she’s racist, and she’s just following the rules that keep certain people down. Parsons’ character seems more jealous of Katherine due to her ability. In fact, in one of the few moments when Katherine loses her temper over shoddy treatment at the hands of the society and various unnamed people in her work group, the white men sitting around her all tend to look rather ashamed of themselves. Furthermore, the movie does depict both Costner’s Harrison and astronaut John Glenn (the only one of the Mercury 7 given any sort of screen time or personality in the grand scheme of things) as being colorblind. Harrison cares more about results than anything else, largely ignorant of much of what goes on outside his office for his best numbers cruncher, and seems inclined to do right when he gets the right prodding from Katherine; Glenn, on the other hand, goes out of his way to greet the black women standing separately from the rest on the day the astronauts arrive, treating them as part of the crew and as actual human beings worth his time and attention. Heck, most of the verbal objections at NASA seem to come from the fact the central figures are women, and Katherine’s love interest Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali) makes that mistake himself when the two meet.
The movie also does some subtle things with costuming. Katherine’s skin isn’t the only color in any room she stands in at work. Surrounded by men in rather monochrome wardrobes, she’s often wearing brighter colors as well, obviously intended to draw the audience eye directly to her. It’s only when she returns to the West Lab that she seems to fade into the background.
Henson is magnificent in this film. By turns smart, mousy, and furious when pushed, her Katherine can disappear into a crowd or make her presence known as she needs to, and her skills as a mathematician earn her the respect of her peers. Spencer and Monae are no slouches either, but this is Henson’s film given her sheer amount of screen time compared to the other two, and she makes the most of it. Nine out of ten stolen library books.
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