And I work like a dog day and night, living on coffee from a pot none of you want to touch! So, excuse me if I have to go to the restroom a few times a day.” “ Did you know that? And I can’t use one of the handy bikes. “There are no colored bathrooms in this building, or any building outside the West Campus, which is half a mile away,” she replies, her indignation slowly rising. It’s a moment charged with tension – and it’s a question that might be reasonably asked of many people today.Ī more overt but wholly genuine moment comes with Katherine’s outburst at the end, when her supervisor, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), accuses her of taking too much time on her breaks. Vaughn,” Dunst says haughtily, as Spencer looks at her and asks, “Are you sure about that, Mrs. Mitchell, who has still not promoted her to supervisor. One of its best scenes involves a private bathroom conversation between Dorothy Vaughn and Mrs. While the dialogue in Hidden Figures may sometimes seem a bit too formulaic and feel-good to be considered revolutionary cinema, it takes a genuine look at injustice and makes itself relevant to today’s contemporary debates about race relations. Zielinski: “Let me ask,” he says to her, “If you were a white male, would you wish to be an engineer?” “I wouldn’t have to,” she replies, “I’d already be one.” She also delivers a satisfying punch to societal racism and sexism in a conversation with Mr. In the end, she finds a solution, successfully petitioning a judge to take night classes at a local high school. Zielinski, who urges her to pursue a track to become a certified NASA engineer. She is part of the team designing the Mercury capsule that will send John Glenn into space, and it’s her supervisor, Mr. One day, when she gets up to use the coffee machine to the horror of the entire room, we are reminded of an age when segregation was so customary and pervasive that even the slightest intimation of racial mixing delivered a psychological shock.Īnother blunt reminder of the era comes with Janelle Monáe’s performance as Mary Jackson, an engineer barred from enrolling in a university training program due to Virginia’s Jim Crow laws. For Katherine, each day at Langley involves an act of either tiptoeing around the office trying to avoid contact with her coworkers, or racing half an hour across town to use the nearest “colored only” restroom. Despite being singled out as NASA’s most gifted mind in analytical geometry, Johnson is still met with aloofness and disdain by her colleagues, particularly Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons), who refuses to put her name on any of NASA’s publications. A math prodigy from a young age, she is selected to be part of the Space Task group aiming to put a man into space before the Russians. Henson plays the film’s central figure, Katherine Johnson, one of the “human computers” working in the West Unit. Mitchell, played by Kirsten Dunst with just the right pinch of petty racism. We see how Vaughn’s team, segregated from the all-white East Computing Group, is forced to work out of a dingy warehouse space despite the vital work it does for NASA. The film follows her struggle to be promoted by NASA’s incumbent personnel supervisor, Mrs.
Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughn, who heads NASA’s West Computing Unit without the official title or the pay. Hidden Figures hinges on the performances of its three gifted leads: Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) irons out the insult with a slick reply: “There are quite a few.
In one of Hidden Figures‘ best scenes, when the women’s car breaks down on the way to Langley Research Center and an officer pulls up asking for identification, Katherine hands him her card and mutters solemnly, “NASA, sir.” “I had no idea they hired–” He nearly says, “Negroes,” but Ms. Theodore Melfi, on the other hand, saw no harm in spicing up his tribute with a little cheekiness. Many film directors would have taken a graver tone as they recreated the story of the three African American women – Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn – whose vital contributions to NASA made it possible to complete its first orbital spaceflight.
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