Oh, the melodrama
If you Google “coloured computers,” the Internet will show you images of spring-green laptops and early, fruit-tinted iMacs. But at NASA in 1961, it was a job title. Computers were the people who computed numbers for the burgeoning space program, and even in post-segregation Virginia, blacks were separate — and decidedly unequal.
Director and co-writer Theodore Melfi has adapted Margot Lee Shetterly’s non-fiction book to present the story of three unsung heroes of the space race; black women who worked behind the scenes at NASA, calculating orbital trajectories and launch windows that could mean the difference between a fiery tragedy and a successful splashdown for the early space capsules.
The most famous was Katherine Johnson, played in the film by Taraji P. Henson. Newly assigned to the Space Task Group and tasked with figuring out “math that doesn’t yet exist,” she is also the only black woman in a crowd of pocket-protector-wearing, bespectacled white guys. To give you a sense of how nerdy the room was, her deskmate is played
by The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons. Her supervisor, played by Kevin Costner, would have raised the cool factor, so he’s in a glass office overlooking the floor.
The film tells us it’s “based on true events,” and there’s no doubt that a black woman working as anything other than a custodian in the aerospace field in the early ’60s would have been subject to all manner of humiliation. Yet the screenplay, co-written by Allison Schroeder, bends over backward to heap semi-comic ridicule on its characters, presumably to make their eventual triumph all the sweeter.
Putting the “running” in running gag are repeated scenes of Johnson scurrying between buildings to visit the nearest coloured restroom, a quarter mile away. It also seems the white cast members (Costner excluded) were given group classes in eyebrow-raising and eye-rolling, to be practised whenever one of the female math wizards got too forward.
Speaking of classes, Janelle Monáe plays Johnson’s colleague Mary Jackson, who had to fight to gain access to a segregated high school for the night courses NASA demanded she take before promoting her. We also meet Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan, doing the work of a supervisor but without any of the pay or recognition.
But it’s Johnson at the centre of things, and so the screenplay sees fit to include Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali as Jim Johnson, a national guardsman and love interest. But the romantic subplot is so underdeveloped it feels like a hastily strapped-on booster rocket. And while the space-metaphor jar is open, let’s add that the soundtrack is more on-the-nose than a perfect atmospheric re-entry.
Hidden Figures is an important story. It features fine actors and sheds light on a facet of NASA personnel of which even a space nut like yours truly was unaware. But there’s too much icing, and too many just-so moments, to lift this story off the ground. The brave, unsung pioneers of the space program deserve better recognition than this melodramatic tale.