We baby boomers remember the intensity of the space program very well, and it's brought home in "Hidden Figures," a 2016 film starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spancer, Janelle Monae, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, and Jim Parsons.
The acting in this inspiring story is excellent, natural, and low key.
Based on a non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly, the film is about three black women who entered the space program as mathematicians. At NASA they had a dual fight - not only were they black, but they were women in a man's world. The film shows the segregation and prejudice they encountered. It also shows a world just before computers came in, with space trajectories figured out in pencil. Totally amazing. The story culminates with - what else - John Glenn's historic orbiting of the earth.
Fortunately for these brilliant, ambitious, and determined women, the prejudice shown in the film was actually overdone to make the story of their accomplishments stronger. Their accomplishments were pretty darned impressive anyway.
In the film, Katherine (Henson) has to walk 40 minutes to the "colored" bathroom until her supervisor, Harrison (Costner) finds out about it. In truth, though this is something Mary (Monae) did encounter, Katherine didn't know about a segregated bathroom and used the regular one for years. Katharine, in fact, when interviewed, said that while prejudice existed underneath, in truth, everybody was concentrated on their work.
Costner's character is a mixture of different people, as is often done in films. He didn't really allow Katherine into an important meeting - she started pushing to attend them, and did, beginning in 1958. When Mary goes to court so she can attend a white school at night, this didn't happen, though the school was segregated. She requested and received an exemption. You can see that would have looked pretty unexciting on film.
I don't think embellishing incidents and creating new ones that don't hurt the true story is a bad thing - the screenwriters wanted to make a point and more importantly, since it is film, do something visually. I think they could have done it without every character so totally against these women. I'm white, and having worked in many offices, I can promise you there's a Jim Parsons character in every one no matter a woman's color. Back then men resented women in positions of authority. Probably many of them still do.
The purpose of true stories told in film, I feel, is to get you interested in the topic and read about it. Anyone looking for complete accuracy is going to be sadly disappointed, as I think some of the reviewers on this board were. But in the end, we still had three amazing women working in the space program - and John Glenn did in fact ask Katherine to verify the IBM calculations before his launch. Pretty darned impressive.
