Hidden Figures is an uplifting movie about women who really changed the world
“The untold story” is one of those movie marketing lines that’s thrown around all too often. Yet I’d be prepared to bet actual money that most people genuinely don’t know the stories of Katherine G Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. Their tale is what Hidden Figures is all about. All three were influential figures at Nasa in the ’60s and beyond, all in crucial roles that pushed forward progress in space exploration. And it’s no small detail that they achieved so much as black women in a time when, even more so than now, being black and being a woman was a significant obstacle to success.
While the words “the untold true story” are right there at the top of the poster for Hidden Figures, this is one of the few films where that doesn’t feel like a cheap advertising ploy. Very few of us are likely to know Katherine Johnson (Taraji P Henson) made invaluable contributions as a physicist and mathematician working on crucial calculations for early Nasa missions, or the story of how Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) became Nasa’s first black female engineer, and how Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) became the first black woman to supervise staff at Nasa’s Langley Research Centre. It’s these truly untold stories that Hidden Figures is all about.
And, yes, there are some things about the film that aren’t necessarily entirely historically accurate, but they are small details and don’t diminish the real achievements of these characters. The film does paint a picture of perhaps a less inclusive Nasa than the organisation truly was at the time, but this is one situation where I think it might best serve the story to compress the events into a shorter space to heighten the drama. Much of the discrimination these women faced is all too real, even if it may not have really happened in 1961 as the film says.
Katherine Johnson really did earn the trust of her colleagues with groundbreaking work, so much so that astronaut John Glenn called on her to double check the calculations of the IBM computer before his launch into orbit. This event does occur in the film, and it’s all the more effective to have it happen at a time when the stakes are high. In the movie Katherine has mere minutes to complete the work, it would take some urgency out of the story to be slavishly accurate to history and give Katherine several days to compute the numbers. It’s also fair to argue that accuracy is a small thing to worry about when the overwhelming message is so positive and based in honest truths about the past. This is a narrative storytelling, not a documentary.
As a film, it might be easy to criticise Hidden Figures for being too inspirational, heartwarming and predictable. I have seen many say that it follows a formula a little too closely. That’s a valid critique, but not one that I feel holds much weight. That this film is crowd-pleasing, uplifting and perhaps a little cosy is something I see as a positive, as it means it can appeal to the widest possible audience. That appears to have really worked, with Hidden Figures being one of the top performing movies at the box office for the first few weeks of this year. It should prove to be similarly successful now that it’s out in the UK too. This is a movie that not only tells an important story but tells it in an entertaining way, with a trio of excellent leading performances and a screenplay that keeps things wonderfully engaging from start to finish.
Ultimately it’s stories like this, stories that put the history we’ve been taught into a valuable new context, that are absolutely vital. For a brief moment, it’s essential to recognise that outside of its strengths as a piece of filmed entertainment this is a highly powerful piece of work that’ll inspire kids to make history themselves and teach adults things they might not have known about the past. It seems clear that many have forgotten the ugliness, discrimination and persecution of not too distant history, and how important it is to make sure we don’t allow such things to happen in our world again. Hidden Figures is a film that reminds us that divisions only stall progress and damage communities, that only together can we build a better future.
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