‘Hidden Figures’ Review: Breaking Barriers of Space, Race and Gender How three black women in the segregated South helped put a man into orbit By Joe Morgenstern
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hidden-figures-review-breaking-barriers-of-space-race-and-gender-1483638262
‘Hidden Figures” brings news that keeps you thinking with amazement, “Who knew?” Its larger subject, set in the early 1960s during the height of the Cold War, is a story that had already been told definitively, or so we may have thought, by Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” and the movie based on his book—Project Mercury and America’s race with the Soviet Union to put a man into space. But who knew that NASA depended, at that pioneering time, on flesh-and-blood mathematicians (they were called computers) to calculate flight trajectories until sufficiently powerful transistor-and-punch-card computers came on line; that many of those gifted people were black women, working together in a segregated unit at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; and that one member of the unit played a crucial role in the flight that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth?
This remarkable story within a story focuses on three of the women: Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), whom Glenn considered indispensable to his Friendship 7 mission; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), who mastered computer language early on and eventually—meaning ever so belatedly—became NASA’s first black supervisor; and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), who, by way of becoming a graduate engineer, had been forced to petition the city of Hampton in order to take extension courses she needed, since they were being given in an all-white high school.
As is inevitably the case when a fiction film is based on a nonfiction book, events have been telescoped and dramatic liberties taken. (Theodore Melfi directed from a screenplay that he and Allison Schroeder adapted from the book by Margot Lee Shetterly. The cinematographer was Mandy Walker.) The tone is earnest, with dialogue that sometimes plods when you want it to fly—a running time of 127 minutes doesn’t help the pacing—and a couple of pieces of casting are infelicitous: Jim Parsons gives a flat performance as the fictional Paul Stafford, NASA’s lead engineer, and Glen Powell is years too young to play John Glenn, who looks like a gung-ho frat boy. (Kevin Costner, by contrast, brings a dry wit and some needed bite to another fictional role, that of NASA manager Al Harrison.)
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