Hidden Figures | Little White Lies

Hid­den Figures

16 Feb 2017 / Released: 17 Feb 2017

Group of people, including a woman in a purple jacket, seated in a church pew.
Group of people, including a woman in a purple jacket, seated in a church pew.
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Anticipation.

A last-minute awards contender with a pretty poor title.

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Enjoyment.

Maybe there’s a poetry to the fact that a film about mathematics is completely schematic?

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In Retrospect.

Monáe and Spencer shine from the sidelines.

The spir­it­ed tale of three secret weapons used in NASA’s ini­tial attempts to send a man into space.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Theodore Melfi’s Hid­den Fig­ures is not a good movie. Sor­ry, but it’s not. It’s win­ning, it’s pleas­ant, it’s mild­ly rous­ing, its heart is right there, front and cen­tre, and it also shines an (extreme­ly bright) light on a trio of remark­able sub­jects. But it is machine-tooled to please and fine­ly cal­i­brat­ed to com­fort. It’s glossy, triv­ial and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly sen­ti­men­tal, work­ing every frame to extract that cli­mac­tic air punch and sin­gle glis­ten­ing tear from its intend­ed audience.

It twists real his­to­ry into the stan­dard­ised Hol­ly­wood dream nar­ra­tive, where adver­si­ty is tri­umphed over, hope defeats despair, and polit­i­cal enlight­en­ment comes from one white man’s will­ing­ness to reset a crooked and malev­o­lent sys­tem. Com­bine the pun­ning title with a Based on true events” open­ing title cards, and you could pret­ty much make up the rest in your head. And yet, utter­ly schemat­ic though it is, Hid­den Fig­ures does high­light the chron­ic absur­di­ty of a frame­work (polit­i­cal or eco­nom­ic) that arro­gant­ly incor­po­rates a base-lev­el big­otry into its inner work­ings. Should some­thing as whol­ly irra­tional as racial seg­re­ga­tion be the giant mill­stone that anchors human­i­ty down in the moral doldrums?

A person working on a large, metallic, cone-shaped structure surrounded by spotlights.

Kather­ine G John­son (Tara­ji P Hen­son), Dorothy Vaugh­an (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jack­son (Janelle Monáe) are just three reg­u­lar pio­neers whose apti­tude for math­e­mat­ics hap­pens to be extra­or­di­nary, and whose skin also hap­pens to be be black. Their skills have been co-opt­ed by the nabobs at Lan­g­ley, Vir­ginia, cir­ca 1961, as JFK has put a rock­et up the col­lec­tive ass­es of those eggheads down at NASA in an attempt to get them trad­ing cos­mic blows with the Russkies. Yuri Gagarin already became the first man to trav­el in space, so it’s up to the US-of‑A to not only catch up, but make the next giant leap.

The film quick­ly shifts its focus away from Jack­son and Vaughn to keep tabs on John­son, as she’s moved into the cen­tral NASA brain trust to cal­cu­late the flight tra­jec­to­ry of America’s first cos­mo­naut, John Glenn (Glenn Pow­ell). Shar­ing a table with her is Paul Stafford, a scowl­ing, pan­tomime vil­lain played by Jim Par­sons and a char­ac­ter who is placed with­in the sto­ry sole­ly with the job of enact­ing all the humil­i­at­ing rites that come with seg­re­ga­tion. It’s then the job of Kevin Costner’s top man Al Har­ri­son to essen­tial­ly chide his dis­crim­i­na­to­ry tac­tics and show that a nation­al fight to touch the stars should not be ham­pered on race and gen­der lines.

The irony of the whole thing, though, is that it preach­es tol­er­ance on Amer­i­can soil while fram­ing Rus­sia as an evil empire. The space race was a large scale appendage mea­sur­ing con­test fuelled by vir­u­lent nation­al­ism, but the hol­low absur­di­ty of the Cold War is nev­er once called into ques­tion. Where the film excels, though, is in allow­ing the three leads room to breath, and a stir­ring court­room mono­logue by Monáe in which she demands to be enrolled in a whites only engi­neer­ing col­lege offers a rous­ing reminder that ratio­nal demands can­not be eas­i­ly ignored.

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