The three leads also find a persuasive chemistry, however lacking in nuance the dialogue can be. Her mathematical know-how impresses hero-in-the-making Glenn (Glen Powell) - and the climactic sequence, in which the boyish astronaut makes clear how much he trusts and respects her, is well orchestrated by Melfi, with a crisp emotional impact in the interactions between Costner and Henson.
Henson is frantic, kinetic, unbowed in her de rigueur heels, embodying the obvious injustice but also a comic dignity - the sequences are a kind of political slapstick.Ĭostume designer Renee Ehrlich Kalfus has character-defining fun with the period fashions, accentuating the women’s vibrancy with dresses in rich hues and prints, a marked contrast with the white shirts, narrow black ties and gray walls of the Space Task Group where Katherine works on life-or-death calculations under mounting Space Race pressure. Cinematographer Mandy Walker, shooting on celluloid in keeping with the movie’s retro sensibility, pulls back to capture these dashes through the Langley campus (Atlanta’s Morehouse College provides the exteriors), the action set to a propulsively catchy song by Pharrell Williams. Halfway through, Henson delivers a showstopper of a throw-down over the half-mile sprints she’s required to make several times a day to a “colored” women’s bathroom in another building.
HIDDEN FIGURES BOOK REVIEWS PROFESSIONAL
More effective, and affecting, are the various moments of professional defiance and triumph for Katherine, Dorothy and Mary. Mary’s husband says, “Freedom is never granted to the oppressed” Dorothy observes that “any upward movement is movement for us all” Mary’s Holocaust survivor boss declares, “We are living the impossible.” But all too often the screenplay is busy funneling its sense of history into self-conscious dialogue that sounds like anachronistic commentary rather than people talking. There are glimpses of the central trio’s home fronts, notably the widowed Katherine’s romance with a soft-spoken dreamboat of a military man ( Mahershala Ali, with far less to do than in Moonlight). His constant balancing act of preoccupation and laser focus is the film’s strongest suggestion of a complicated inner life. The hostile setup has a borderline cartoonish quality to it, but something more nuanced unfolds between Katherine and the group’s director, Al Harrison (Costner, persuasive). Mitchell ( Kirsten Dunst) tells her unapologetically. “They’ve never had a colored in here before,” personnel supervisor Mrs. She gets a chilly welcome from the group’s executive assistant (Kimberly Quinn) and a quietly belligerent one from lead engineer Paul Stafford ( Jim Parsons). Henson’s Katherine, the only person on-site with a knack for analytic geometry, joins the Space Task Group, although “joins” is something of an overstatement. Her supervisor ( Olek Krupa) recognizes her talent and urges her to sign up for the engineer training program - no simple feat in the Jim Crow South, but a challenge that she ultimately takes on, despite the misgivings of her husband ( Aldis Hodge).
Mary Jackson ( Monae), the mouthiest and most demonstrative of the three friends, is thrilled to be placed on the team working on the Mercury capsule prototype. From those quarters, Katherine’s friend and colleague Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer) supervises the group without benefit of that official designation or the salary that would go with it, sending the “colored computers” on assignments around the research facility. A math prodigy - as a prologue set in 1926 West Virginia illustrates - she’s a member of the West Computing Group at Langley, 20 African-American women who are “computers,” in the lingo of the day, segregated from the white computers in the East Group and housed in a dingy basement office (one of the many evocative sets in Wynn Thomas’s production design). In this rallying cry for STEM girls everywhere, Henson plays the adorably bespectacled Katherine Goble (later Katherine Johnson).
0 kommentar(er)
