Hidden Figures

The movie opens with a very young Katherine Goble getting accepted to a prestigious school because she is a math whiz.  Thirty years later, she (Taraji Henson) and two other women - Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae) - are stranded on the side of the road with a broken down car.  A police officer shows up and demands ID and is generally unfriendly.  However, once they explain they work at NASA, he proves willing to provide an escort.  At NASA, the three are members of the West Area Computers (at the time, a computer was just a person who did calculations with pen and paper or an old-fashioned mechanical calculator).  Dorothy is the unofficial supervisor of the colored computers, Katherine is the most brilliant mathematician among them, and Mary is attracted to engineering.

Except for the prologue of Katherine as a child, the movie compresses events into a 1 year window, opening a few months before Al Shepard's Mercury flight in May 1961 and ending with John Glenn's orbit in February 1962.  That's fine except that events well outside of that period are included.  Thus, we get incidents that date 10 years back.  Because of this, a lot of real people were replaced by fictional versions, otherwise some of this would be libelous.

For instance, the Space Task Group was run by Robert Gilruth but he is replaced by the fictional Al Harrison (Kevin Costner).  The designer of the Mercury capsule was Max Faget but he is replaced by the fictional Karl Zielinski.  What little we learn of Zielinski is that he is Polish and his parents were killed by the Nazis during the war.  Is he supposed to be a replacement for Wehrner Von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist who was integral to the US Space Program?  Certainly more politically correct to have a Polish Jew.

White characters are uniformly racist.  Only three white characters are painted as other than racist: Al Harrison, Karl Zielinski, and John Glenn (Glen Powell).  The scene where Harrison "discovers" that the engineers had setup a separate 'colored' coffee pot for Katherine was particularly egregious.  He only just now discovered it?  Doesn't he drink coffee?  He has glass as his office wall and the coffee table is easily visible.  His righteously indignant speech followed by his ripping down of the colored ladies room sign was completely unbelievable.  Segregation at Langley ended in 1958, outside the timeframe of the movie.

 

According to the film, it is only thanks to the mathematical talents of Katherine Johnson that we were able to orbit the earth.  I have no doubt that she was an integral figure but she is shown to be so much smarter than this room full of brilliant mathematicians and engineers as to be silly.  She is the sine qua non of American Space Flight.  Jim Parsons had the role of playing an arrogant, probably racist, jerk who, despite being embarrassed by her math talents repeatedly, continued to look down his nose at her.  However, by the end, he shows he has gained some respect for her.  Yes, black women can do math too.  Ugh.  Of course, her life events from the 50s (promotion out of the West Area Computers, marriage to Jim Johnson, desegregation of Langley) were all included.

The storyline of Dorothy Vaughn is done so ham-fistedly that I cringed.  NASA has purchased IBM computers and the half dozen white men who are supposed to operate them are utterly clueless.  They can't get the mainframe to do anything.  Meanwhile, Dorothy gets a book from the library (the racist librarian called the cops to eject her and her two sons!) on Fortran, reads it, and schools these white doofuses in how to work the IBM.  She was promoted to her unofficial supervisor position in 1949, not 1960 as the movie implies.
 

Oddly enough, though she was probably the least addressed of the trio, Mary Jackson's story arc was the best.  Her success required that she get advanced training available only at a segregated high school.  She took her case to court, made a strong argument to the judge, won her case, and started attending classes to qualify for an engineering position at NASA.  Of course, she had made her move out of the West Area Computers in 1953, not 1961.  Also, she had completed her advanced training in the 50s.

Yeah, I get it, segregation was wrong.  Worse, much of the dialogue is written as a social justice warrior would write it.  Katherine smacks down Jim's sexist comment like a 70s feminist rather than the mousy mathematician she is otherwise portrayed to be.  Katherine's explosive rant in the middle of the office was about as bad a reaction on the part of an employee as imaginable in reaction to the horrible job of management by Harrison.  Meant to be dramatic, I just shook my head and rolled my eyes.  That is a fictional scene from the mind of the screenwriter.  We needed to spice it up, add some drama, more tension!  Yeah, right.  Dorothy undiplomatically rejects her supervisor's (Kirsten Dunst) claim that she's not a racist.  Shortly thereafter, Dunst arrives - almost cap in hand-like - to ask if Dorothy would be so kind as to teach Fortran to the white lady computers.  Be humbled, you racist bat!

The movie does give an accurate 'feel' for the flow of each woman's life but is forced to fictionalize a lot of the setting.  Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson were amazing women of remarkable accomplishment but this movie spends more time picking at the scabs of racism and sexism rather than celebrating their talents.  Fine, we need some context for the era but the context doesn't need to be repeated every 5 minutes.  Because it mixes fiction with fact and tinkered with the timeline, I don't know what to believe.

Skip the movie but check the links to each of the three impressive women who contributed to the American Space Program.