BEFORE: This film comes up in my chain at a rather specific time - we're planning a vacation for October, a week down south that will serve as the second leg of our BBQ Crawl across the US. We're planning to drive from Dallas (where we started last year) and drive to Austin, San Antonio, Houston and finally New Orleans, and we're just now trying to figure out how many days to spend in each city. Are there more fun things to do in Austin, or San Antonio? Probably neither city has as many fun things as New Orleans, right? Just as we're wondering whether Houston is more of a 1-day stop or a 2-day stop, my wife remembered that there's a Space Center there, so that could be a potential bucket list item, to visit a NASA site and see whatever's there. So perhaps Houston becomes more of a 2-day city, if we want to see that and some other cool things around that city also. Sorry, Austin and San Antonio, from what I've seen there might only be enough interesting things in each of your cities to amuse us for one day each, and I'm taking into consideration both the Alamo AND the River Walk in San Antonio. Austin might be a cool town, but it's also where all the hipsters are - so I feel justified in cutting back on it.
This film makes three in a row for Kirsten Dunst, as she carries over from "On the Road". A new direction will bring me to Father's Day film #4 tomorrow.
THE PLOT: The story of a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program.
AFTER: OK, so the film's not set in Houston, nor is it set in Florida, the locations most associated with NASA. This is set at the Langley Research Center in Virginia, where progress was being made in one field (aeronautics/rocketry) while hampered in another (civil rights). This is the second film I've watched this year that pointed out how backwards Virginia was when it came to things like de-segregation, equal rights and allowing people of different races to get married (as seen in "Loving"). What was up with Virginia? It wasn't even in the deep South, it's right up there, close to the Mason-Dixon line. Why did that seem to be the most backwards thinking state in the 1960's? Was that because it had been racist the longest, since Colonial times?
It's hard to even fathom it now, but it wasn't that long ago that African-Americans had to use a different bathroom, different swimming pools, sit in different seats on buses - and most people, black and white, just went about their day, as if nothing was wrong with the system. You can still sort of feel the fallout from the battles that people fought to get equal service, and some people are still fighting today, for equal pay and equal opportunity. But at least today we can call out injustice when we see it, like people arrested for just sitting in a Starbucks, or for loitering (the legal term for "doing nothing" or "suspiciously being a minority") or for hanging out in a park with the intent to barbecue. When you go back to the early 1960's, though, you can see how things were much worse.
The three women profiled in this film - Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, all faced similar challenges, but found three different ways to go around, over or through the rules that were seemingly meant to impede their progress. If this film is to be believed, Johnson made her mark through the power of math, since she was able to develop equations for things that no one had been able to figure out before, like how to determine when a capsule in orbit needs to change to a parabolic orbit in order to make landfall. And every little thing needed to be taken into consideration - not just speed but also the weight of the capsule, angles, etc. I don't even know how anyone would even start to wrap their brain around that problem. It literally took a human computer - that's what they called these women who just did math all day, before we had mechanical computers, we had human ones.
Vaughan, on the other hand, realized that one day IBM would make a machine that would calculate faster than the human computers, so she "borrowed" a book on Fortran from the library for white people and learned that programming language ahead of most other people. This enabled her to make the transition from human computer to someone who could program mechanical ones, with that weird punch-card system they had back then. This is someone who understood the basics of job security - that everyone is replaceable, but if you can get ahead of the game and keep your skills polished, you might still be valuable to the organization when the changes come about.
And Mary Jackson became an engineer at NASA, the first black female to hold that job. The rules stated that she could qualify for the job by taking night courses offered by the University of Virginia, however, they were held in an all-white school. So she filed a petition in court for the right to attend the night classes, and (again, if this film is to believed) sweet-talked the judge into allowing some small form of desegregation in the name of posterity.
Of course this was an important, overlooked chapter in American history. But if I've got doubts about this film, they stem from questioning whether the situation may have been over-dramatized somewhat. When one character is called to bring calculated information to the control room and literally has the door slammed in her face, I'm forced to wonder if that's a case of taking a metaphor just a bit too literally. I think I'm on to something here, because the characters depicted as having the most trouble with working side-by-side with black people are not based on real people, they're sort of composites of the attitudes of several unnamed people. So packing the racism of several people into one person seems, by definition, a form of exaggeration. There were other historical inaccuracies that I don't have the time to break down right now, but you can find them on Wikipedia if you're interested in the facts of the matter.
If we look to this film for advice on how to heal the current racial divide in our country, then the answer is simple - just identify a common enemy that Americans hate more than each other. Because it seems that all racial barriers were torn down as long as everyone hated the Russians more, and in the end, no matter what color we are, we're all Americans that should be working toward a common goal. It's a shame that today we don't have a common goal, like putting a man in orbit and then the moon, so civil rights progress occasionally seems like it's at a standstill. If anything, we're going backwards, now that Nazis are holding rallies again and comedians still think that making fun of another person's race is somehow OK.
Also starring Taraji P. Henson (last seen in "Hustle & Flow"), Octavia Spencer (last heard in "Zootopia"), Janelle Monae (last heard in "Rio 2"), Kevin Costner (last seen in "Criminal"), Jim Parsons (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Glen Powell (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Mahershala Ali (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Donna Biscoe (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1"), Karan Kendrick, Jaiden Kaine, Rhoda Griffis (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Maria Howell, Aldis Hodge, Paige Nicollette, Gary Weeks (last seen in "Sully"), Lidya Jewett, Ariana Neal, Saniyya Sidney (last seen in "Fences"), Zani Jones Mbayise, Kimberly Quinn, Olek Krupa (last seen in "The Dictator") with archive footage of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Redstone rocket tests
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