It may seem like an odd choice as a second film for Theodore Melfi, who directed the Bill Murray comedy St. Vincent a few years back, but he ably finds a way into the stories of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), whom we meet as their car is broken down at the side of the road on their way to work at Langley in Virginia. The women are part of the West Computing division, made up entirely of black women with higher math skills to solve the complex problems involved with building the rockets that will send men into space. From a very young age, Kathryn was good with math and geometry, so she gets assigned to the team of Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), who has been tasked with getting a man into orbit around the Earth and then bring him home safely. Mary is assigned to the Mercury 7 project, but she has dreams of becoming a full engineer, which requires attending engineering classes at a segregated school. Dorothy has been running the department and doing the job of a supervisor without getting compensated properly. At the same time, IBM is trying to set up the first machine that can perform the complicated math at a faster rate, and Dorothy quickly realizes that learning computer programming can put her in a good position to remain relevant with the ever-changing technology. The inherent racism is more subdued, occurring usually due to the slightly more veiled prejudices of white supervisors like Paul Stafford, the project’s chief engineer as played by The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons. He never has much confidence in Katherine’s abilities. The other one is Mrs. Mitchell (Kirsten Dust), who is inadvertently holding many of these women back from fulfilling their potential merely due to Jim Crow laws of the time. On the other hand, there are some open-minded people at Langley like John Glenn (as played by Glenn Powell) and Harrison himself, who only care about their mission of beating the Russians into space. Still, it’s a little disconcerting when you realize how much American progress may have been hindered by white people until they became more accepting of these amazing women. The performances are good, especially Henson and Spencer, although they do get a little overblown at times, mainly when they need to express their frustrations with the system that keeps holding them back. Despite everything going on at Langley, the film also gets into the domestic life of the three women, Katherine being a widowed mother trying to care for her three kids while also working. She eventually meets a good man—another fine turn by Mahershala Ali in a year where he’s been everywhere—who gives her the needed emotional support. All of this is accompanied by bright poppy songs by Pharrell Williams, including the song “Runnin’” used every time Katherine has to run to the “colored women’s” bathroom a half-mile away—and almost guaranteed to become a theme for anyone with a weak bladder. Hidden Figures opens nationwide on Jan. 6, 2017. This review was first published on Dec. 12, 2016.
