4.5 stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.6.17
A film that moves its audience to
cheers and applause, as the screen fades to black, is an exhilarating experience
for the patrons involved.
But a film that also prompts such
a response several times during the
course of its story?
 |
| When John Glenn (Glen Powell) arrives at the Langley Research Center, he makes a point of greeting members of the West Area Computing team: from left, Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe, partially obscured). |
That’s a rare gift.
Director Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures isn’t merely a
crowd-pleasing slice of actual history; it’s also a sly social statement, and a
rich showcase for its three starring actresses. Melfi and co-scripter Allison
Schroeder have turned Margot Lee Shetterly’s absorbing nonfiction book into an
engaging drama that charms and fascinates in equal measure.
More than anything else, though,
I remain stunned by the fact that half a century has passed, before this
jaw-droppingly amazing story has been brought to our attention. What the heck took so long?
The setting alone is an
eyebrow-raiser that somehow missed being discussed in any of my history texts. Much of NASA’s initial
efforts during the early days of the space race, playing catch-up after the
Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1 and several subsequent spacecraft,
took place at Virginia’s Langley Research Center, then very much a part of the
Jim Crow South.
The campus included a remote,
fully segregated arm known as West Area Computing, staffed entirely by African
American women — all mathematicians — somewhat dismissively dubbed “computers.”
When a group in the larger, posher east end of the center needed numerical
verification (basically arithmetic scut-work), a lead engineer — all of said
engineers being white and male — would send for “a computer,” much the way a
temp secretary would be requested.
Shetterly’s book profiles four
such women: Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Christine
Darden. The latter has been omitted from this film; the other three have been
brought to glorious life, respectively, by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer
and Janelle Monáe.
(A quick bit of back-story not
included in the script: The World War II-era recruitment of women allowed Vaughan,
originally a mathematics teacher, to be hired in 1943 by the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA. Jackson and Johnson, also
mathematicians, were hired in 1951 and ’53, respectively.)
