In the early days of cinema, before the Talkies erected language barriers to a global trade in moving pictures, there was a phenomenon whereby film studios and producers would respond to the local tastes and predilections of audiences by cutting different versions of films. American audiences loved a happy ending, whereas the Russian ending would often be tragic.
'Hidden Figures' is a film that perhaps could have benefited from a Russian ending, which is ironic for a film with the Cold War as a backdrop. As it is, this feels like a film made under Obama for release under Clinton - where the onward march of civil rights has not come up against a terrifying and heavily armed white Republican roadblock. It's a film whose need to make its audience feel good causes it to pull its punches. Of course, 'Hidden Figures' creators could not be expected to have been clairvoyant about last year's election, but it is ultimately a film about black women stripping away injustice with diligence and dignity to achieve the American dream. This is a tale that rings a little more hollow now than it did when President Obama awarded one of its central characters the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Like the UK's 'Pride' - the story of radical lesbians and gay men in the early 80's supporting the Miners' Strike - and being supported in return, the film was moving and uplifting, but ultimately leaves one very aware that this was a dramatised confection in which the real lives of the women portrayed were but one ingredient. Like 'Pride', it has left me with an appetite to explore the original source material for the true, warts and all story, real life ups and downs rather than the rhythm and American ending of a feature film. Like 'Pride', it was a film that could not quite cure itself of involving and ultimately sometimes even crediting white men for the advancement of women: "we get there together, or we do not get there at all" says Kevin Costner's stern-but-good-hearted white NASA boss. The film concludes that the American national story requires no greater self-examination or criticism than Kirsten Dunst's white administrator acknowledging Octavia Spencer's equality by finally addressing her as "Mrs. Vaughn" rather than a patronising "Dorothy".
The pivotal moment is a cri-de-coeur plea for her own dignity by Taraji P. Henson's Goble / Johnson when she is questioned by her white boss and finally snaps, but this feels thoroughly out of character. Henson's Goble / Johnson is otherwise a shy, retiring woman who is confident in her own abilities, as we see when she puts her future husband in his place for questioning her fitness for her work, but in little else, as we see in her genuine fear of her white colleagues. I am not convinced that this woman, sure of her skill and her dignity, but feminine, restrained, and rightly afraid of the white authority that could at any moment take from her everything she has would snap and shout at her boss about her toilet needs, or scream at a room of white men about the indignity they have forced on her.
The film tries its best to make these black women the agents of her own advancement: Janelle Monae's Mary Jackson wins a court case to attend an all white school in order to attend classes necessary for her eligibility for promotion and advancement not with a lawyer but through her own eloquence, but ultimately she wins her case before an elderly but kindly old white male judge, and is supported by a white, male, Polish Jew holocaust survivor. No Werner von Braun in this version of the Space Programme. Handsome, blonde, dimpled John Glenn insists on meeting the black women, and insists on Goble / Johnson checking the final numbers for his mission "get the girl, the smart one to do it", and it is this portrayal of white America's self-satisfaction at and self-congratulation for the emancipation of black people that is most grating. It makes the film feel like it lacks the courage of its convictions. Kevin Costner's "right stuff" NASA boss takes a sledgehammer to the segregated loos following (and only following) Goble's demand for dignity, bashing away as shocked women look on, and it's too ambivalent as to whether this is white male authority conceding power, not the women taking it for themselves. To be fair, this is nicely undercut by the composition of the scene. The women look on as their loos are forcibly desegregated: white women and black women standing separately on each side of the doorway. The visual makes it implicit that Costner cannot desegregate single-handed. The white man does not get to claim credit on his own. Other than a passing reference to a freedom-rider bus firebombing, the white people are, in general, rather generous and progressive in getting out of these women's way, and this is a sanitised desegregation. Costner's presentation of Henson with a string of pearls even as she is being removed from the job that she loves because no-one will take her skills and achievements seriously feels uncomfortably like the presentation of the slave with manumission by the 'generous' master who nonetheless shrugs his shoulders at the injustice of the system. The overall effect is that one is left with the feeling that this film is to make everyone feel good, and for white America's conscience to be left untroubled. Yet again, the black women are responsible not only for working for their own freedom, but for the redemption of the white people along the way. The commercial incentives for this are obvious, but artistically, it sits ill, and ultimately in turning away from the ugliness of Jim Crow and refusing to look it in the eye, it undermines the successes of the women it is attempting to celebrate. It's practically absurd that the disgusting daily indignity of segregation is largely confined to Henson's semi-comical runs to the toilet, and by Jim Parsons and Kirsten Dunst's hauteur and workplace rudeness.
The other problem with the film is how flawless these women and their families are, both by contemporary and modern standards, which militates against dramatic depth. Again, this is understandable: our heroines are exceptional, pioneers, and, one assumes, genuine heroes to the film-makers. The temptation to hagiography is obvious, but in the months following the Clinton defeat, it feels uncomfortable: that women and black people must attain a superhuman standard of virtue to "earn" their equality. The Jacksons are portrayed as the couple who chafe the most under the yoke of Jim Crow: "civil rights ain't always civil" says Levi Jackson, but this is not followed up. Jackson is a non-threatening, supportive househusband, who sends his wife off to her engineering class with a thoughtful gift. Were the producers afraid of showing us "angry black people"? The effect is to beg the question whether equality here is something that is earned by these people of superhuman virtue, who never put a foot wrong, and not the resolution of a burning injustice that is the birthright of all black people born into citizenship of a United States that systematically denies that citizenship and right, regardless of whether or not white America approves of them as the 'right' sort of black people.
Even whilst widowed, Katherine Goble's endlessly supportive mother provides her with the childcare she needs to combine her demanding career at NASA with single parenthood, and when Costner's response to Gagarin's victory in the Space Race for the Russians is to turn up pressure at the office and tell his employees (including Henson) to call their 'wives' to tell them they'll be permanently working late, we do not see whether or what domestic consequences this had for her as a working single mother in the sixties. Perhaps this is reflective of the reality of these women's lives that domestically they were extremely fortunate, but it feels at times as though these women must face racism and sexism, but strangely not often both at the same time. That feels like selling the audience short.
Notwithstanding its pandering to white consciences and need for absolution, this is an enjoyable and uplifting film whose faults are more than made up for by three engaging, warm and moving central performances. Even with the quibbles with its conservatism, it remains a lovely portrayal of female friendship. I fear that the conservatism will cause the film to date poorly, even though it's a historical piece to begin with, but given that we now live in Trump's America, mainly I just hope that in the story of black women gaining their rightful place, it does not prove to be real life that has the Russian ending.
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