I’m not the biggest moviegoer. I want to make sure something’s worth the cost if I’m going to spend hard-earned money to go see it. I’d heard a number of good things about Hidden Figures, a new film about the African American women who worked at NASA and did calculations on Project Mercury and other missions, so I figured I’d give it a try.
(Skip this paragraph if you don’t want major plot spoilers.) The first thing that struck me when the end credits started rolling was how good and empowered I felt. The central premise of the movie is that Katherine G. Johnson, a brilliantly gifted mathematician, moves from her position as a calculator in the “colored” department to calculate the flight trajectories for the first launches of men into space. Her companions, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, make enormous strides in their own ways, becoming supervisor of the IBM computer division and the first African American woman to go to a segregated school and become an engineer, respectively.
The film does an incredible job showing how far a little kindness and determination can take you. The women face obstacles every day because of their status as African American women. Schools are segregated, bathrooms are segregated, and they’re forced to ride on the back of the bus. There are scenes of riots and “trouble” that portray life on the streets. Mary Jackson sums up life pretty well in one of the opening scenes after they have some car trouble: “Three Negro women chasing a white police officer down a highway in Hampton, Virginia in 1961. Ladies, that there is a God-ordained miracle!”
In retrospect, the best part of the film wasn’t the plot or the characters. It was little moments. (More spoilers!) Katherine finds herself the center of hate in the headquarters where she’s promoted to work as a calculator. They give her a separate coffee pot because they don’t want to use one with a colored woman. She ends up walking half a mile to use the bathroom because there aren’t any for “her kind” any closer. When the boss (Al Harrison) confronts her about “where the hell [she] goes every day” she explains the situation, in a meltdown of hurt, anger, and frustration. The next scene shows Al Harrison standing outside the colored women’s restroom with a crowbar knocking down the sign, and declaring “Here at NASA, we all pee in the same color.”
There’s a beautiful blend of the difficult, funny, and charming that really works throughout the movie. The underlying love story is perfectly intertwined without feeling gratuitous. Best of all, this movie is timely. As we head into a new presidential inauguration, it’s important to revisit these times of social change and progress and remember how far we’ve come. It’s important, too, for children to see films such as this. While we have come an incredibly long way, we still have farther to go. Films like this can help inspire young women to keep holding onto their dreams and become the next visionaries that will change our world.
