They don’t “have it all,” but they do strive for balance and connection. On the weekends, they go to church and neighborhood barbecues and spend time with their children. If one gets held up at work for hours, the other two wait in the parking lot until they can all drive home. Though most of their time and energy go to their careers, the women of Hidden Figures don’t take their relationships with each other and with their friends and families for granted. Their intellect may not be broadly relatable (again, they’re exceptional for a reason), but their sense of rootedness is. Their intellect may not be broadly relatable, but their sense of rootedness is. She spends much of the film maneuvering to protect her team’s jobs, even if it means risking her own status and security. Still, Dorothy’s frustration with her stagnation at work doesn’t translate to defeatism or selfishness. But individual victories are often simply that-Katherine knocking down one pillar of discrimination doesn’t mean countless more don’t remain. Of course she’s proud of Katherine, and of course Katherine is paving the way for others. It’s a subtle, but loaded point, and one of the most thought-provoking lines in the film. It’s just not movement for me,” she says, disappointed after a setback at work. “Any upward movement is movement for us all. Each is uniquely aware of the broader stakes of her success-for other women, for black people, for black women, and for America at large-and this knowledge is as much an inspiration as it is a heavy weight.Įarly on, Dorothy shares her ambivalence about Katherine’s prestigious new assignment.
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The women consistently out-think their higher-ranked (usually white, male) colleagues, whether by learning a new programming language, solving problems in wind-tunnel experiments, or calculating narrow launch windows for space missions. Dorothy is fighting for a long overdue promotion, while the arrival of an IBM machine threatens to put her team of computers out of work. Mary must navigate layers of racist bureaucratic hurdles in her quest to become an engineer. Katherine is closest to the excitement, but Hidden Figures widens its scope beyond her. She arrives at her new job to find she’s the sole brown face in the room. is so desperate to beat the Soviet Union into space that NASA becomes a reluctant meritocracy: Because of her expertise in analytic geometry, Katherine is assigned to a special task group trying to get Glenn into orbit. Due to Virginia’s segregation laws, African American female computers have to work in a separate “colored” building at the Langley Research Center.
Katherine, Mary, and Dorothy are part of NASA’s pool of human “computers”-employees, usually women, charged with doing calculations before the use of digital computers. Hidden Figures begins in earnest in 1961. (It’s worth noting that, as a dramatization, the film makes tweaks to the timeline, characters, and events of the books.) But her story is woven tightly with those of Mary (Janelle Monáe) and Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) the former became NASA’s first black female engineer, the latter was a mathematician who became NASA’s first African American manager. Henson) is the film’s ostensible protagonist and gets the most screen time.
By refracting the overlooked lives and accomplishments of Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson through this lens, Hidden Figures manages to be more than an inspiring history lesson with wonderful performances.įrom the start, Hidden Figures makes clear that it is about a trio, not a lone heroine.
They’re phenomenal at what they do, but they’re also generous with their time, their energy, and their patience in a way that feels humane, not saintly. Vincent) and based on the nonfiction book of the same title by Margot Lee Shetterly, the film celebrates individual mettle, but also the way its characters consistently try to lift others up. Licorice Pizza Is a Tragicomic Tale of 1970s Hollywood David SimsĪnd yet Hidden Figures pays tribute to its subjects by doing the opposite of what many biopics have done in the past-it looks closely at the remarkable person in the context of a community.
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