Hidden Figures Review

Last summer, I saw the trailer for Hidden Figures and thought that it looked like one of those simple, feel-good, family-friendly Disney films.  You know, like Queen of Katwe, which also had advertisements out at about the same time.  Then this movie got nominated for Best Picture, and I wondered if there was something more to it, that it was a serious drama that rose to the level of high art.  I was going to watch this regardless of the nominations it received, because it looked like a good non-action, non-franchise film that would nonetheless be entertaining.  Also, various people at my workplace had watched it and strongly recommended it.  So I wondered, with all of the buzz, what sort of artistic masterpiece I would be walking in on.

As it turns out, my impressions from the trailers were right, and I'm a bit surprised that it got nominated for Best Picture.  Not that I'm complaining, because I liked it.  It was fun, family friendly, wholesome, and had a good heart.  It's just that it's comes off as so modest, and films like this usually aren't nominated.  It wasn't particularly ambitious, wasn't directed with much prestige, and mainly succeeded in being a family-friendly drama.  I keep on saying that word, "family friendly," since perhaps that's the best way of describing this film.

The type of film that this is reminds me a bit of Miracle, by the way, which was also one of those wholesome, feel-good films about real events produced by Disney.  Of all the films that fit into this vaguely defined category that I'm dealing with right now, that one's easily my favorite, and definitely my favorite sports film.  It never got nominated for anything, though, and now with Hidden Figures's nomination, I realize that it might have actually had a chance of having academy recognition.  Who knows, maybe more films like this will get nominated in the future, but I doubt it.

So yeah, asides from knowing that that it's like "one of those simple, feel-good, family-friendly Disney films," the only other two things that people might be interested in knowing, which is how accurately it depicts real-life stories, and how it treats racial issues.

Let me start with the real-life stuff: the film is set in 1961, but a lot of the advances that the main characters made actually happened a lot sooner than that.  Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, was even promoted to supervisor as early as the Forties.  That's pretty impressive.  Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson achieved their goals in the film in the Fifties, which isn't quite as impressive, but should still be mentioned.  It seems that the director didn't want to make a movie that spanned across several periods, however, and wanted to set the film in the 60's, since there were a lot of famous things going on during that period to add to the atmosphere of the film, most significantly of which was the launching of John Glenn into space.  It makes for more of a feel-good movie if the advancement of the black women and John Glenn's history-making flight coincided.

Some of the people in this film were composite characters, based off of multiple real-life people and depicted as one person for the sake of simplicity.  For example, the management of the Space Task Group was a bit complicated in real life, and for the sake of the film the whole thing was personified through Kevin Costner.  Multiple engineers were represented through Jim Parsons.  What was important here was that the ideas behind the true story were represented, and not so much the strict literal truth, which would have been a bit more cumbersome and made for a much longer, much more serious film.

As for the racial issues, Hidden Figures doesn't provide much commentary on contemporary race relations, and it doesn't have much to preach.  It definitely has an interest in the racism of its setting, but even then, though it's a central theme of the movie, it doesn't dive into that theme as much as other recent films have, instead choosing to focus mainly on its characters.  The director wasn't interested in the broader implications of racism so much as its specific impacts on the main characters.  He doesn't paint the social constructs as vividly as some other recent films have, and this movie is hardly avant-garde.  However, it doesn't have to be, and in the meantime it isn't like it's whitewashing history.  It seems to me that the director was aware that many of the more profound and definitive films about race during that time period had already been made, and that it was redundant to try to be just as profound as them, especially since that wasn't the focus and the feeling that the film was going for.  Hidden Figured isn't gut-wrenching, but feel-good.  It isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, and instead assumes that people already have seen some of the more provocative material on the subject of race, and that forms the background for this film, which has the luxury of being feel-good and family-friendly.

Finally, I would be amiss if I didn't confess to finding Janelle Monae, who played Mary Jackson, is incredibly attractive and likable and talented, and on her own made this film worth watching.  I might be developing a celebrity crush.