The three women at the forefront of Hidden Figures are, indeed, extraordinary. Geniuses of different sorts, they happened to live during an unfair time when their qualities were shunned because of the color of their skin, instead of being appreciated for what they really were: wizards of complex math that I can't even begin to fathom. Katherine Goble (Taraji P. Henson) is a widow with three daughters trying to prove her worth to her superiors (Kevin Costner, sporting a rather appropriate haircut for the early 1960s) by figuring out upcoming US astronauts' launch into orbit and landing calculations; Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae) badly wants to enter an all-white school in order to earn an engineering degree, but her efforts are hampered by the segregation of the time period; and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) simply isn't appreciated enough at work while doing the job of a supervisor, but without the supervisor's salary.
The movie is definitely a crowd pleaser, and had it been produced by Disney, it surely would've evoked memories of Remember the Titans and Glory Road, similar fare about the segregation era in which the unfair racism was put aside by the oppressed protagonists' white superiors in order to achieve a greater good together (I'm sure the real story featured a lot more hardships for the three heroines than the movie ever acknowledges, but that's Hollywood for you). Hidden Figures may not reinvent the wheel about the changing times of the early 60s Americana, but as a drama about overcoming adversity as a minority in an unfair environment, it delivers exactly what it promises.
B
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