Hidden Figures

Theodore Melfi’s film follows three Black mathematicians around the 1961 Mercury programme, though its most consequential choice was made at the writing desk. Allison Schroeder built the screenplay while Margot Lee Shetterly’s book was still unfinished, working from raw research the author handed over; she had grown up near Cape Canaveral and interned at NASA while in high school. Katherine Johnson’s Friendship 7 calculation took a day and a half in reality, squeezed on screen into a couple of hours. The equations chalked up are not wallpaper. Morehouse mathematician Rudy Horne worked as the on-set consultant, the handwriting in the young Katherine scene belongs to him, and the Euler’s method idea that reached the script was his suggestion. The segregated restroom thread, by contrast, is wholly invented: the real Johnson used the whites-only facilities from her first day onward. Kevin Costner’s supervisor is a fictional figure too. The promise of three equal strands does not hold up. Katherine keeps the weight, Dorothy Vaughan’s IBM gambit stays the thinnest line, and obstacles spread across nearly a decade get piled around one launch window. Comfortable viewing if you accept a fictional white supervisor carrying the gesture against segregation. Uncomfortable if you came to work the blackboard maths as a puzzle; the numbers are correct but you are never asked to follow them.