But unlike the wonderfully subtle writing for that relatively sophisticated series, the “Hidden Figures” screenplay - which Melfi and Allison Schroeder adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly’s newly published nonfiction book - has a tendency to deliver its message via direct, on-the-nose dialogue (e.g. As a woman, Vivian can empathize with the challenges of a discriminatory workplace and yet, as a white woman, she doesn’t get it at all, oblivious to her subconscious role in keeping her black colleagues down (“Y’all should be thankful you have jobs at all,” she says), for which Dorothy quite rightly puts her in her place.Īs in “Mad Men,” so much of the gender and race dynamics are conveyed via body language, subtext, and the telling way characters look at one another. Meanwhile, Dorothy takes orders from a curt, condescending white lady (Kirsten Dunst), who addresses Dorothy by her first name, and offers little help with her request for a promotion to supervisor, despite the fact Dorothy is already doing the job.
At work, Katherine is promoted to a job with the Space Task Group, where manager Al Harrison ( Kevin Costner, whose gum-chewing, crew-cut look nails the era) is too distracted to notice tension between his employees, especially boss’s pet Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons, playing the sort of reductive stereotype that talented minorities have been forced to settle for over the past century - not ideal, as characterizations go, though such payback seems only fair). If only everyone’s mind could so easily be changed. Henson’s character, Katherine Johnson (after whom NASA later named a computational research facility), lived long enough to see a black president, but not a female commander-in-chief. “Hidden Figures” is empowerment cinema at its most populist, and one only wishes that the film had existed at the time it depicts - though ongoing racial tensions and gender double-standards suggest that perhaps we haven’t come such a long way, baby. Vincent”) illustrates via his simplistic, yet thoroughly satisfying retelling is just how thoroughly the deck was stacked against these women. What wasn’t necessarily evident in 1962 was that these “colored computers,” as they were called by NASA, deserved to be afforded the same rights and treated with the same respect as their white male colleagues - and what director Theodore Melfi (“St. Today, there is nothing surprising about the fact that black women could handle such a task, and clearly NASA was realistic enough to recognize this at the time.
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