‘Hidden Figures’ women bonded
Film’s subjects “encouraged each other”
The three talented ATLANTA mathematicians at the heart of the historical drama Hidden Figures helped take America into space. Their carpool cruise home in a 1957 Chevrolet after work, however, was their time to vent about not going anywhere in their jobs. Filming a scene for the movie (in theaters Christmas Day in 14 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Washington; expands nationwide Jan. 6) in an old ice cream warehouse on a warm April day, Taraji P. Henson is seated in the back as Katherine G. Johnson, the woman whose calculations would ultimately help John Glenn orbit Earth. Yet Katherine’s first day working with NASA scientists in 1961 hasn’t gone so well.
Her colleagues are similarly irked: Octavia Spencer’s Dorothy Vaughan is angry that she leads the “colored computers” — a group of black women crunching numbers every day — but doesn’t get a supervisor’s pay, and Janelle Monáe’s Mary Jackson isn’t having any luck in her dream of becoming an engineer.
“Truth be told, Dorothy, I don’t even know if I can keep up in that room,” Henson says, giving Katherine’s tone a worrisome edge. “I’ll be back with the computers within the week or out of a job entirely.”
“Oh, please,” Spencer responds. “You’re better with the num-
bers than anyone in that room, Katherine, and you know it. Just make that pencil move as fast as your mind does, you’ll be fine.”
That mind would be key to America staying competitive with the Russians in the 1960s space race, though Hidden Figures ( based on the Margot Lee Shetterly book) explores the obstacles facing the country as well as the three main characters — not only racial but also gender inequality, involving white men in a workplace who didn’t know what to make of a black woman being the smartest person in the room. The movie pairs a strong female-empowerment message with heady themes and feel-good vibes.
“It just says that when we stick together, we can change the world,” says Monáe, a Grammywinning musician whose first Hollywood audition was for Hid
den Figures. “It wasn’t just because of Katherine or Mary or Dorothy, it was because they all stuck together. They leaned on each other’s shoulders, they cried, they laughed, they loved, they encouraged each other.
“It’s because (Katherine) had her sisters there to encourage her that history was made.” The work has proven fruitful.
Hidden Figures was nominated for three Critics’ Choice Awards — including best picture and best supporting actress for Monáe — and Spencer is up for supporting actress at both the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild ceremonies. The movie also snagged a SAG nomination for best cast.
With its roots in the civil rights movement, Hidden Figures “reminds us how far we’ve come and respecting each other no matter what we look like, the color of our skin or where we come from,” says Erik Davis, managing editor for Fandango.com and Movies .com. He adds that the film could be a strong Oscar contender.
As the movie starts out, things aren’t peachy keen for the core trio. A West Virginia native who graduated high school at 14 and college by 18, Katherine is assigned to a group at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. The outfit is led by NASA head honcho Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), who wants Katherine to look “beyond the math” to help figure out how to get Glenn (Glen Powell) to space and back safely. But she’s looked down upon by other men, and she has to run to the other side of the campus just to use the colored restrooms.
“They’re engineers and they’re scientists, but they allowed some of that (prejudice) to creep over, and the net effect was the cream wasn’t necessarily rising to the top,” Costner says. “Human nature has pettiness and insecurity in it, and that crosses all racial boundaries.”
Meanwhile, Mary is a bright young woman who specializes in aircraft data and wind-tunnel experiments and wants to become the first female engineer at NASA of any race. And Dorothy is stonewalled by her boss (Kirsten Dunst) when it comes to getting properly paid for the work she does, all while NASA is installing a huge IBM computer that threatens to make Dorothy and her charges obsolete.
The women are there for one another on the job and in their personal lives, and it mirrors the chemistry the trio of actresses found with each other. “When we come together, you see all our superpowers working seamlessly together,” Monáe says. “And we have a real sisterhood.”
In the car scene, Mary — who can be saucy when speaking her mind — gets a little too comfortable for her co-worker, and Dorothy takes a moment from driving to smack her passenger’s legs. “Have some respect. Get your damn feet off my dashboard! This isn’t your living room.”
After the camera stops, the actresses keep going, riffing on their dialogue and having fun with their characters.
“How do I make them give me more money?” Spencer says. Henson allows a moment of silence before responding, “Set it off!” Everyone cackles with delight.
Spencer figures Monáe is like “if Lena Horne and Diahann Carroll had a daughter,” and she brings a definite spark to Mary, “a mathematician on fire.” And for Dorothy, Spencer wanted to give her a motherly approach with her friends and children and an authoritative side at work. “She’s a no-guff lady,” Spencer says. “She’s not going to come in and give you warm hugs and cookies.”
The friendship between the real women got them through the issues of the day, and co-writer and director Theodore Melfi believes most of the themes in
Hidden Figures are still a part of our world and have even been magnified decades later. Equal pay and equal rights for women are ongoing fights, he says, and black Americans continue to struggle for justice in the workplace and beyond.
“We seem to be in another Cold War with Russia all of a sudden, which is remarkable to me how that happened, and we’re in a Cold War with ISIS and in a constant state of battling forces we can’t understand or predict,” the director says. “This movie for me is all about that.”
Making this kind of film is why Powell got in the business, he says. “We’re in this time of division right now where it doesn’t really feel like the United States of America. ... And this is a movie about people coming together to accomplish something that seemed impossible and doing it in the name of freedom and togetherness.
“The basic premise of math is about efficiency,” Powell adds. “And when you’ve got racism, sexism and bigotry, that’s just standing in the way of efficiency in our own progress. This is a movie that just says: ‘Hey, why are we making this harder than it has to be? We can be united and wonderful and love each other.’ ”
Powell sees a lot of chatter about women’s equality and “the glass ceiling,” yet what Hidden
Figures does well is having men supporting women in all facets. Costner’s character is a champion for Katherine, and so is Powell’s astronaut Glenn. Powell says one scene comes straight from the real Johnson’s memories: Glenn (who died Dec. 8 at age 95) broke from the pack, much to the chagrin of some, during training in Langley in 1961 to chat with Katherine and her colleagues.
In a scene filmed at an Atlanta middle school, where the halls and rooms were turned into the inner workings of a 1960s NASA complex, Glenn gets a call from Al right before the 1962 launch of Friendship 7 at Cape Canaveral. The landing coordinates spit out by the high-tech IBM seem off, which makes Glenn feel a little iffy about the mission that will become his historic three orbits.
“When I fly, I fly the machine, and right now it seems like this machine is flying me,” Glenn says. “I mean, this is just coming from the guy riding the top of a rocket.” He then thinks of Katherine: “Let’s get the girl to check the numbers. If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.”
Powell wants Hidden Figures to “encourage the conversation for men to stand up for women and the amazing things we can do as a collective species when we work together.”
For Costner, our history involving minorities and women is a complex one, and the story of
Hidden Figures mirrors America’s as a whole.
“The contributions are heavy and the injustices are great and the victories are thrilling,” the actor says. “This country tries really hard — it’s trying right now in its own way, and it’s being tested. But people are trying, and we should tell our own story, and we shouldn’t be afraid of where the chips fall.”