Hidden Figures is a nice movie with a great subject that makes you feel good about America, reminds you how far we’ve come since the segregated and male-dominated days of the 1950s, and even reminds us that once we dreamed big about exploring the stars and going to the moon and all that kind of stuff. Most of us have no idea that African-American women in the 1950s and ’60s played important back-up roles in the development of the space program, and Hidden Figures is an unabashed tribute to them, their nobility, their good manners, their resolve, their determination, their hard work, their gumption, and their ability to retain their dignity under often humiliating circumstances.
It’s just kind of blah, that’s all.
You can’t watch this movie without finding yourself lost in admiration for Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the mathematicians who are the “hidden figures” of the title. But there is almost no conflict here that isn’t resolved during the scene in which the conflict arises. Even the mean, condescending sexists and segregationists here are relatively polite about their inhumanity.
And the people who aren’t mean and segregationist are absolutely wonderful. Mary Jackson is “mentored” (as we say now) by a Jewish scientist with a flowery Eastern European accent who insists she take courses to become an engineer because “we live in an age of miracles,” as proved by the fact that his parents died in a concentration camp and he is standing under a module that will carry a man into space. (This character never existed in real life.)
When Katherine is assigned to help with the mathematics necessary to plot Mercury-capsule takeoffs and landings, she is told not to expect any kind words or emotional support from the gruff boss of the Space Task Group, Al Harrison (a fictional character played by Kevin Costner). But then, all Harrison does for the rest of the movie is follow her with his admiring eyes, say appreciative words, insist on desegregating their facility’s bathrooms, and all but stage a ticker-tape parade every time she walks into his office.
Katherine is a widow with three small daughters—but then, like clockwork, along comes a lieutenant colonel from out of nowhere at church one Sunday who initially expresses sexist views but then apologizes for them, cooks her dinner, proposes, and that’s that: She’s happily paired off like Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan.
For all I know, Katherine Jackson’s long second marriage was as easy and as convenient as Hidden Figures makes it out to be, but everything here is so relatively frictionless that you never do much more than say “awwww” whenever anything good happens to these women. The main difficulty Katherine experiences is getting to and from a bathroom half-a-mile away from her desk, which is at first played for laughs and then used for the single dramatic flourish that director Theodore Melfi allows Taraji P. Henson, the otherwise highly combustible actress who goes off like a firecracker practically every week on the peerless soap melodrama Empire.
Melfi and his co-screenwriter Allison Schroeder, working from a book by Margot Lee Shetterly, clearly knew what they were doing when they decided to drain the drama out of Hidden Figures and ladle on the sentimentality and uplift. There’s no question that America’s moviegoers could use a little unifying uplift at the present moment. On the one hand, this is exactly the coda to the Obama years that Barack Obama himself would have wanted. And on the other, it hearkens back to the very time that Donald Trump tries to evoke when he says he wants to make America great again.
This is what Hollywood used to call a “message picture,” except that it doesn’t really have a message other than “Boy, they were great, weren’t they? Let’s give Katherine and Dorothy and Mary a hand.” Which is a very nice thing, as I’ve said. But after awhile, you want someone to haul off and punch somebody else, just to get some life into the thing.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
