★★★★★
In The Big Bang Theory episode “The Hamburger Postulate,” Sheldon Cooper is furious that Leslie Winkle (Sara Gilbert) has corrected a mathematical formula on his board.
It is with greater subtlety that Jim Parsons plays Paul Stafford, a NASA scientist who barely conceals his disdain for the black woman who corrects his work and makes herself indispensable to putting an American in orbit, and bringing the astronaut back down safely.
Before electronic computers became commonplace, and before Rosa Parks refused to get off a bus seat reserved for a white passenger, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor to NASA) employed dozens of women, including black women, to perform hundreds of tedious calculations needed to achieve manned spaceflight.
A film like this has to highlight the absurdity of segregation. Katherine Goble (Taraji P. Henson) is assigned to do computations in the office immediately below that of Director Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), but no one thinks to put in a colored ladies’ restroom in the building.
It isn't until after noticing her brilliant insights into the practical problems of spaceflight that Harrison finally thinks to ask why Goble is so often away from her desk. After learning that she has to run half a mile to the colored ladies’ restroom, Harrison takes steps to desegregate the research facility.
Meanwhile, Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is the de facto supervisor of the other black women computers, but Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) refuses to give her the title or the pay of a supervisor.
When Vaughan notices the installation of an IBM computer, she takes to heart President Kennedy’s take on crisis: it’s danger and opportunity. Danger that her subordinates will be put out of work by the machine, and opportunity to learn how to program that machine.
After having seen movies like 42, there are still plenty of manifestations of segregation to shock those of us too young to have witnessed it firsthand. Such as that libraries in Virginia were segregated, as shown in Hidden Figures. So of course the colored section at the library wouldn’t have books on programming the newfangled electromechanical computers.
Vaughan is not deterred: since the librarian refuses to let her check out any book that’s not in the colored section, Vaughan stuffs a book about FORTRAN in her purse before the security guard escorts her out the building. She's a quick study, swiftly getting the machine up and running.
The third major plot thread is about Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) and her effort to be recognized as an engineer despite management moving the goalposts on her. She has to convince a judge to allow her to take night classes at an all-white school.
I guess I better stop there before anyone complains I'm giving away the whole movie. But spoiler alert: future Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio, Glen Powell) does safely make it back to Earth.
Right wingnuts are already mocking this movie as “hyped figures,” and dismissing the story of Katherine Johnson as “politically correct revisionist history.”
One of them betrays his racism by writing that “minority occupied America” is incapable of putting a man on the moon, but is quite capable of hyping “politically correct myths.” Not giving the bastard a link.
Since Nichelle Nichols (TV’s Uhura) was unaware of Katherine Johnson, that’s an open-and-shut case that the Hidden Figures book is complete fiction, right? Source book author Margot Lee Shetterly must have made it all up, huh?
Well, I figure that back in those days federal agencies weren’t all that concerned with celebrity opinions. The white leadership at NASA probably didn’t care what Nichols thought of them, and so felt no need to trot out Johnson or any other black person in their employ as a counterexample to the TV star’s criticism.
And sure, the movie takes poetic license for dramatic effect. Costner’s character, for example, is a composite of three different directors, and Parsons and Dunst provide visible antagonists for Henson and Spencer to play off of.
And apparently, Glenn said “get the girls,” plural (not singular like in the movie), “to check the numbers,” according to a fellow Daily Kos writer (note that I use a same window link for this one).
Don’t let the racist idiots dampen your enthusiasm for this movie. It’s a great movie, and it deserves 5-star reviews and at least one Oscar (of course I’m neither a Tomatometer critic nor an Academy voter).
I thought of deducting an eighth of a star for the running time being in excess of two hours, but I can’t think of a single thing to cut. The plot thread of Colonel Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali) courting Katherine feels a little awkward, but it also feels like the unvarnished truth, and I feel that it is essential to the story.
Actually, I can think of things to add. I would have put in, just before the end credits, a little video clip of President Obama presenting Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Probably the producers had a long discussion as to whether or not to include that clip.
Of the many awful things about the dreaded impending Trump presidency is that the celebrity real estate buffoon will devalue the Presidential Medal of Freedom, whether by awarding it to people who don’t deserve it, or to people who do deserve it but would decline it on account of who’s giving it.
Of course this assumes that Trump’s nuclear incompetence doesn’t get us all killed. The days of segregation, when a smart black woman would not be given the recognition she deserved, that’s not when America was “great.”
But when a bureaucrat and an astronaut valued and availed themselves to her talent, that was a time when America was greater than it had been before. We must be aware of this history, even if with a little Hollywood embellishment, if we are to do anything to keep this great country from repeating the more shameful chapters of its history.
Hidden Figures is rated PG “for thematic elements and some language.” The 127-minute film came out in limited release last year to qualify for the Academy Awards this year, but is now in wide distribution.