Hidden Figures

               It took me a while to see Hidden Figures.  Not because I didn’t want to, but because other things were usually ahead of it on my movie list.  With so many items on my list, I tend to let a lot of films come when they come.  Which is why when Hidden Figures finally hit the top of my list, I was really excited to receive it in the mail.  There had been so many great things said about this film, and I wanted to see what everyone was talking about.  Once I did, I couldn’t figure out how Hidden Figures didn’t receive more awards than it did.   

                It’s the early 1960s and the U.S. is desperately trying to get a man into space.  Helping NASA accomplish this is a group of African American women who act as “computers” by checking the math of others.  Shoved into their own building, away from everyone else, these women are a group of people very few inside NASA recognize.

                It isn’t until Katherine Goble (Taraji P. Henson) is reassigned to another area that people start to take notice of these women.  Katherine’s new assignment is to check over the math of those directly trying to get an American man into space.  When Katherine enters their doorway, the others are not happy to see her.  They make this clear by getting Katherine her own coffee pot to use, instead of allowing her to share with everyone else.  Also, they do not believe Katherine can do the work.  The one who tells her this the most is Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons).  He regularly tells Katherine how pointless it is to have her there, and how badly she is doing her job.  Little do Stafford and the others know, but Katherine is smarter than all of them.  In fact, she is possibly smarter than all of them put together.

                In another part of NASA, Katherine’s friend Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) has been moved to work with the engineers.  There, Mary finds a supportive engineer who truly listens to what she has to say and encourages her to become an engineer herself.  Unfortunately, at first, Mary’s husband is not supportive of this thought.  In addition, Mary must face a court battle in order to go to school and achieve her dream.

                Another friend of Katherine’s is Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), a woman who has been acting as the unofficial supervisor of all the women acting as “computers”.  She has been doing this job without either the title or the pay.  To prove she is worth far more than she is getting credit for, Dorothy teaches herself and the other women of the group how to code computers, the machine NASA is bringing in to replace them.  As a result, Dorothy and the women end up knowing far more about coding a computer than those bringing the computer in.

                All through this film, Katherine, Mary, Dorothy, and the other women they work with, prove that neither their race nor their gender have anything to do with their intelligence, despite what others try to tell them.  As they work and are given the opportunity to show how intelligent they are, they get others to come around to this fact too.  One of the biggest people who give these women support is Katherine’s boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner).  Since he was always so absorbed in his own work, I don’t know if Harrison was ever truly aware of the segregation that was happening at NASA.  Once he found out that Katherine was going to a different building in order to find and use a non-“whites only” bathroom, he broke down the “whites only” sign in his building, making every bathroom open to all races.

                Someone who didn’t have to have their eyes opened was John Glenn (Glen Powell).  When he and the other astronauts were meeting the employees of NASA, he was the only astronaut who went over to speak to Katherine, Mary, Dorothy, and the other women they worked with.  He did this even as others tried to steer him away.  Then, when the numbers weren’t adding up as he was about to go into space, Glenn insisted that Katherine look over the numbers; no one else.  I have been told that in real life John Glenn was a very popular senator.  If he was anything like the portrayal in this film, I can see why.

                Hidden Figures shows a whole other side of NASA that few knew anything about.  After watching this film, I have to wonder what other hidden stories there are behind the histories we think we know so well.  I hope that with the success of this film, other stories like this begin to come out.  So many people have been in the shadows for far too long.  It is time they get their due.