Stories about historic trailblazers are appealing, but they too often emphasize the exceptional at the expense of the ordinary, reinforcing the narrow Great Man (and Woman) view of history. Director Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures, which presents a fictionalized portrait of black female mathematicians and engineers in NASA’s Project Mercury, mostly resists this temptation in two ways. The first is right in the title: Hidden Figures is a story about people who were essential to the American Space Program but have remained largely invisible in its history. The second is by keeping the everyday humiliations of Jim Crow burbling beneath the surface of what is mainly a Space Race procedural. Much of the film’s action takes place at Langley Research Center in segregated Virginia.
Hidden Figures focuses on three women: mathematics prodigy and “human computer” Katherine Johnson (Tiraji P. Henson); aspiring aerospace engineer Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe); and Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer), supervisor of NASA’s black female technicians and eventually a FOTRAN programmer. The film takes significant liberties with the historical timeline and personalities to sculpt two parallel narratives: a wonky thriller, culminating in John Glenn’s successful 1962 orbital flight, and a character-driven drama about the struggle against adversity.
Melfi’s direction is, at best, smoothly functional, but the screenplay is unfortunately enamored with “saucy black lady” zingers and self-aware gestures that betray Hidden Figures as more of a sardonic simulation of the Jim Crow South than an authentic recreation. Still, it’s crowd-pleasing in a way that is more genuine than pandering, buttressed by warm scenes of daily midcentury life among the black middle class, as well as a charming performance from Henson that balances the demure, inquisitive, and provocative in Johnson’s personality. While the film is rarely memorable, it’s enjoyable as grown-up historical dramas go.
Hidden Figures opens Friday, January 6 in wide release.
