Review: Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures (PG)

USA 2016 127 mins Dir: Theodore Melfi Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Glen Powell

If you crave an uncomplicated feelgood crowd-pleaser in which ground-breaking black women humiliate smug, arrogant white men with their superior brainpower against a backdrop of period racism and sexism, Hidden Figures is the jolly, lightweight inspirational family movie for you. It charts a predictable course, delivering all the anticipated setbacks and victories, permitting modern liberal audiences to express their disdain for antediluvian attitudes about race and gender from the comfort of a more enlightened era, without feeling remotely threatened or challenged themselves.

As with so many films that claim to be “based on a true story”, the accuracy of what’s shown on screen has been contested. But in fairness to director Theodore Melfi, who adapted the book of the same title by Margot Lee Shetterly, while there may be exaggerations and invented and composite characters here, most of the key events depicted actually happened.

It’s 1961 and the damn Russkies are winning the space race. Over at NASA, the heat is on to propel John Glenn into orbit. But the absurdities of racial segregation mean that many of the brightest and best are being unnecessarily hampered in their patriotic duty. The ‘colored computers’, as female African-American mathematicians are known, are stuck in a dingy basement at Langley, well away from the white folks. Hidden Figures tells the stories of three of them, the main one being Katherine Goble (authentically bespectacled Henson) – a prodigy with a particular talent for analytic geometry. Recruited to the Space Task Group run by Al Harrison (crew-cut Costner), she receives the coldest of welcomes, especially from Harrison’s number two, Paul Stafford (Parsons, playing an eminently hissable invented character who embodies the era’s bigotry). Not only does she have to endure separate coffee making facilities, but she faces a half-mile sprint to the ‘colored bathroom’ each time she needs a piss. Katherine’s friends don’t have it any easier. Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer) does the work of a supervisor, but her snotty white boss (Dunst) refuses to give her the promotion she merits. And the sassiest member of the trio, Mary Jackson (Monáe), has to fight through the courts to gain access to an engineering course at a whites-only college.

Perhaps wisely, Melfi doesn’t bother explaining to his audience what analytic geometry is; nor does he explore Goble’s work beyond the broadest of strokes. Instead, we get plenty of scenes where she scribbles complex formulae on a giant blackboard while the white boffins rub their chins before breaking into “By jingo – she’s got it!” expressions. The performances by Henson, Oscar-nominated Spencer and multi-talented popster Janelle Monáe (who can also be seen in Moonlight) are all sufficiently likable to transcend the occasionally turgid dialogue and a screenplay that sometimes feels as though it’s been precision engineered to a heartwarming formula in one of those NASA labs. Under-valued Kevin Costner is also on fine form, as he so often is in these period roles, playing composite character Harrison as a fundamentally decent boss who’s so obsessed with the monumental task at hand that he initially fails to notice the discrimination suffered by his star number-cruncher. But we could, perhaps, have been spared his big “Here at NASA, we all pee the same colour” speech.

Hidden Figures gets the job done efficiently enough, while leaving us yearning to know more about the women whose forgotten story is finally being told. Interestingly, the only two-dimensional character here is John Glenn himself, played by Glen Powell as a brave, all-American square-jawed hero with a million watt smile and not a trace of prejudice, who could have stepped out of the pages of a comicbook.