Hidden Figures brings that stealth triumph into the light, one number at a time.Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly In her simple, unassuming plaid dress and smart-girl cat’s-eye glasses, she’s about to challenge their world-and change it for the better. She’s different from them, because she’s a woman and she’s black. Her drive to use numbers to show the world who she truly is has a specific and pointed context here: Numbers have no color, and no gender, either.Īnd when Katherine walks into the Space Task Group office for the first time-as a sea of white guys in identical white shirts and dark ties turn to stare at her, wondering what on Earth she’s doing there-the spirit of the room shifts perceptibly. Even Katherine’s big writing-on-the-blackboard moment is different from similar scenes we’ve seen thousands of times before.
Henson, Spencer and Monáe all give superb, luminous performances: Watching them is pure pleasure. Vincent) and adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, the picture is buoyant and alert every minute. It’s something else to bask in the movie’s spirit.
It’s one thing, though, to outline what Hidden Figures is about. And Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), another gifted mathematician, decides to make the leap to become an engineer-only to find that if it’s hard enough for a white woman to pull that off, it’s nearly impossible for a woman of color. Meanwhile, two of Katherine’s friends and colleagues at Langley steer around their own roadblocks: Utra-capable Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is doing the work of a manager, though her covertly racist boss (Kirsten Dunst) refuses to either promote her or pay her what she’s worth. The round trip takes so long that her absence raises eyebrows. She brings her work with her on these bathroom breaks, but that doesn’t matter. The only restroom she’s allowed to use is in another building, a half mile away. When she tries to pour coffee from the office’s communal coffee pot, her colleagues, all white and nearly all male, shoot knowing glances at one another-and the next day, a small, separate-but-supposedly-equal pot appears on the table, specifically for her use. Jealous, resentful colleagues (one of them played by The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons) try to undermine her: She’s black and a woman, a double whammy their threatened white male egos just can’t handle. Even so, the obstacles she faces are almost as daunting as putting a man into space. Katherine can do more than just run an adding machine, as she quickly proves.
(And because this is pre-integration Virginia we’re talking about, she’s dispatched from a room designated for “Colored Computers.”) Henson), a former child prodigy who has found work at Langley Research Center as a “computer,” the term given to women skilled at running calculations on an adding machine. When Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), the harried engineer in charge of NASA’s groovily named Space Task Group, asks in exasperation, “We don’t have a single person in this entire building that can handle analytic geometry?” the unassuming woman who’s sent to his office is Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Its characters are based on real-life people, a trio of African American math whizzes who also happened to be women, and who were employed by NASA in the early 1960s to help crunch crucial data for the first space missions. Hidden Figures, both a dazzling piece of entertainment and a window into history, bucks the trend of the boring-math-guy movie. Who needs to see another white dude grab a piece of chalk and start writing feverishly on a blackboard?īut even if numbers are everywhere, they still have the capacity to surprise us. Yet movies about people who deal in numbers-often foisted on us as spinachy, good-for-us entertainment during prestige-movie season-tend to be deadly dull. In the grand scheme, numbers mean everything: Our very bodies are made of equations.
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