Opening today:
Hidden Figures—We tend to think of NASA as part of the “New
Frontier” and “Camelot” and the general unembarrassed optimistic idealism we
associate, accurately or not, with the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. So it’s a
slight jolt to realize that the space program, at least in its early days (then
NACA, or the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics), was segregated.
It was, of course, decades before there were female or
nonwhite astronauts, but in at least one facility, the Langley
Research Center
in Hampton, Virginia, the segregation was overt. A pool
of female African-American “computers”—the term was applied to humans who
performed complicated mathematical functions in those days—was relegated to a
separate building and separate restrooms on the Langley campus until at least 1958.
This drama focuses on Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P.
Henson), who, among many other career achievements, calculated flight
trajectories for John Glenn’s first orbital Mercury mission in 1962. It also
depicts Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), the de facto supervisor of the
department, and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), who became an aerospace engineer.
The director, St.
Vincent’s Theodore Melfi, working from a script he wrote with Allison
Schroeder (based, in turn, on Margot Lee Shetterley’s nonfiction book) seems to
have compressed and conflated the chronology of events here for dramatic
convenience, but he gets across the essentials of this remarkable story,
another in the seemingly bottomless supply of belatedly-told instances of
American achievement by women and minorities, in the face of outrageous
intolerance. The style is standard inspirational uplift, and the
characterizations aren’t deep, but the cast—the three leads and also Kevin
Costner as the Langley
big boss—are vibrant enough to fill in the blanks.
The bright primary-color cinematography and the midcentury
period detail are parts of what make this cinematically inconsequential movie
so pleasant. Another part, I confess, is the glamour of the lead actresses—I
know we’re supposed to be celebrating their intellectual and social triumphs,
but as they scurry around in their pencil skirts and glasses, they also show a
lot of nerd chic.
A Monster Calls—English
adolescent Conor (Lewis MacDougall) lives in a lovely old country house with
his adored, cancer-afflicted young mother (Felicity Jones). One night, after he
and his mom have watched King Kong
together, Conor receives a visit at his bedroom window from a monster; an
enormous anthropomorphic tree, something like the green man of myth, who speaks
in the rumbling tones of Liam Neeson.
Over the course of the film, The Monster tells Conor three odd
stories of elusive meaning, something like Sufi parables, insisting that when he
is done with his three, Conor must tell him a fourth story. Eventually he
tells The Monster his story and, as with the end of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his own agonized, guilty
secret is revealed.
This film, directed by J.A. Bayona, is based on the
much-honored 2011 children’s novel by Patrick Ness, which was based, in turn, on
an idea and some notes by the late writer Siobhan Dowd. It’s a poignant,
handsomely-made piece of work, with beautiful animated sequences (illustrating The
Monster’s stories) and fine acting, not only by MacDougall and Jones but by Toby
Kebbell as Conor’s absentee dad and Sigourney Weaver as his stern, terrified grandmother.
It’s also nice to see Geraldine Chaplin, in a small but effective role as an
authority figure at Conor’s school.
Above all, it has a memorable presence in the great creaking,
rustling, uprooted Monster. The special effects depicting him are lovely, and it’s
nice to hear that urgently authoritative Neeson voice used for something other than
threatening bad guys in lurid action movies.
