In “Hidden Figures,” a black woman’s prolonged absences from her desk attract notice from her peers: Why is she taking all of these 40-minute breaks? Is she lazy? Incompetent? Is she on drugs? No, it turns out: It’s 1961, and there are no “colored” restrooms in the building. She has to jog across a campus to find a building where she’s allowed to use the facilities.
So it goes for the black women pioneers at NASA at its number-crunching offices in Virginia during the Mercury spaceflight program — the same one chronicled in “The Right Stuff.”
That movie, in retrospect, becomes the White Stuff, one that focused almost exclusively on the pale males who, in Chuck Yeager’s famous formulation, had so little to do that they were in essence “Spam in a can.” What about the people who put them in space and in orbit — people like Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)? “Hidden Figures” reminds us that the engineers, not the astronauts, accomplished the most amazing work, some of it carried out by unjustly obscure black women.
The film by Theodore Melfi (“St. Vincent”) is a feel-good story that is nonetheless sickening in places: At the outset, Vaughan works in a room labeled “colored computers” (computers being NASA’s term for people who did low-level number-crunching). In Jim Crow America, even math is racialized; “Hidden Figures” provides a fresh angle on how demeaning, demoralizing and crazy it was to live in an era of officially sanctioned white supremacy, one that people had grown used to pretending was perfectly normal.
Yet “Hidden Figures” is a triumphant and heartwarming film, not an angry and scolding one, that carefully maps how excellence and determination win over the doubters. A gruff-but-open-minded supervisor (Kevin Costner) who learns of the bathroom hassle takes a crowbar to the sign reading “Colored Ladies Room.” “We pee one color here,” he says.
Working against impossible deadlines, women like Johnson deliver memos involving calculations that are obsolete by the time they’re typed up, but aren’t allowed to attend classified briefings that will help them keep up with developments — “there’s no protocol for women,” complains an engineer (Jim Parsons) who is suspicious of the changing nature of the workplace. Meanwhile, Jackson can’t attend vital night courses she needs to succeed because the nearby college that offers them is for whites only. In one of the movie’s most satisfying scenes, she quietly explains to a judge that ordering the desegregation of the school would bestow upon him the honor of being the first to do it.
Melfi, who styles the film in an easygoing way reminiscent of 1980s movies instead of the more incendiary style that became fashionable after that, doesn’t entirely avoid cornball moments, but the way “Hidden Figures” discovers a back road to the exact same all-American pride that suffused “The Right Stuff” is soul-stirring. After John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit Earth, Costner’s character says to Johnson, “Can we get to the moon?” She replies, “We’re already there, sir.”