HIDDEN FIGURES    3.5***

    What a breath of fresh air in these dark times! “Hidden Figures” is an amazing, uplifting, inspiring story focusing on the successes of three African-American women whose mathematical and computer-science skills directly helped NASA launch astronauts into space (and back) and eventually to the moon.

The story revolves around three brilliant African American women, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) who work at NASA's Langley “Colored” calculating division in the still segregated Virginia. The bulk of the events depicted are from 1961 when Russia beat the USA in putting a man into space and then the an all-out drive by NASA to put John Glenn in space.. If you had asked me "When did NASA desegregate?" I would have been stumped, because I never knew NASA was segregated. The movie gives a disturbing sense of the raw frustration and pain caused by senseless discrimination, and it does so simply by showing , as one example,  the harsh reality and indignity of having to walk over a mile each day just to use the bathroom. The women entrusted to make critical astronomical calculations couldn't even be trusted to share a bathroom for a minute or two in what is one of the most common, natural, and inherent aspects of humanity.

And it's a double-whammy: they're black, and they're women. Hidden Figures is just as much, if not more so, about sexism and exposing the baseless belief that women either should not or cannot excel at science. There's a great satisfaction when, at last,  Kevin Costner,  the Director of the Space Task Group, literally sledge-hammers the”Colored” bathroom signs down, ending a practice that never should have started.

Do yourself a favor and catch Hidden Figures on the big screen, see it with a big crowd, and feel a sense of humanity trickling back in.

Rated “PG”

Clark