Directed by: Theodore Melfi
Written by: Theodore Melfi, Allison Schroeder, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly
Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae
IMDb Link
Hidden Figures is an absolute feel-good movie, the kind of tale that leaves you with a smile on your face and a spring in your step as you walk out the theatre. While this kind of story of human triumph isn't new, it's presented very well here, largely due to the three excellent leading ladies.
The film centres on three women: Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson (Henson, Spencer, and Monae respectively), who are all working for NASA in 1961 during the early years of the space program. Hidden Figures explores the trials that have to face as both women and people of colour in that time, and seeks to show the persistence and skills of these women.
The whole thing is what you'd expect from a movie designed to warm your heart; each girl has their own individual challenge to face in a time when society treated them injustly. The goals and roadblocks these three face are all handled very well, honing the significance of their successes by not pulling punches about the racism and sexism they have to deal with on a daily basis. Even if you've heard this sort of story of justice trumping injustice before, the film does it well enough that it still cause your heart to leap a little when each woman does succeed in their area. Part of this is also because the film makes sure to present how good they are at what they do. It's rewarding to see these women succeed not just because of the progress it means for fighting racism and sexism, but also because we as an audience know how much the women have done to deserve the successes they achieve.
Each actress plays their role very well, though I particularly enjoyed Monae as the mouthy Mary; it's hard not to like a character who isn't afraid to speak her mind despite how she might be treated, and Monae is believable as the character. That said, this shouldn't distract from how good Henson and Spencer are as well. Spencer's character seems the least looked at by film's end, but she still plays the more mature and stern role extremely well, and Henson is superb as the lead character among the three, carrying the majority of the film's scenes with strength despite timidity; Henson's character Johnson has to deal with arguably the toughest challenge, and Henson presents her slow-growing confidence very naturally.
While I have a lot of praise for this film, I also found the story's pacing to falter at points. The film has to juggle the arcs of all three main characters, which meant getting involved with not just their work lives but how their work affected their home lives too, as well as including a lot of the necessary information related to the urgency of the space race. It isn't an easy task to balance all those elements, and the film handles it well enough for the most part, but there were several scene changes that felt rushed as they tried to express every characters situation before moving on the how they would deal with their problems, and the finale involving having a man in orbit come back down out of orbit fell a little flat because of a lack of tension. A small issue before launch is corrected by Johnson, and then it's out of the main characters' hands. While that should be a tense moment if we don't know whether or not this mission was successful, the film has spent its time putting a hell of a lot of confidence in faith in Johnson's abilities, and a movie maintaining this level of happiness was unlikely to drop a bomb on us before its end. It doesn't ruin the film's ending, but some of the final moments are less predictable-but-very-charming and more just predictable.
The Verdict: Hidden Figures is, in a word, nice. It tackles real issues that women and black people had to face at the societal level, but it does so in a way that never doubts the indomitable human spirit, and recognises the achievements of the three women it focuses on with great enthusiasm. While the pacing of the plot was off at times trying to juggle the three individual stories and include information relevant to the space race, the three leads never falter in their strong performances and carry the film to its end.
Rating: 7.5/10
Published February 12th, 2017
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