Hidden Figures: Balancing Realism And Melodrama
Lifetime movies, mostly joke fodder for those of us who spend our lives studying and analyzing film, remain a lucrative business despite that scorn. That is because every one of the films run by the channel draws on the desire for catharsis that draws all people to drama.
Hidden Figures is the film that Lifetime movies strive to be, but always fall short of.
Melodrama, before it became a negative description for art that cheaply used dramatic incidents in order to create mass appeal, was simply art that focused on drawing out emotion. Post-modern dramas have taken the old mantle of melodramas, almost completely removing intense action sequences and replacing them with quiet and more intimate meditations on the human condition. The task for post-modern melodrama success has become how to appeal to emotions with action and suspense, without sensationalizing to the degree that events become exaggerated and false.
The key appears to be restraint.
In Hidden Figures, there is the seemingly perfect balance between the truth and the dramatization of the real events of three Black women who made history at NASA in the 1960s. Melodrama is somewhat about simplification, and in this case director Theodore Melfi, manages to simplify the complex situation of sexism, classism, and racism in the United States, without saying anything disingenuous about any of the concepts. While in other race films, White people might be all bad and Black people suffering with no help, Hidden Figures provides nuance without heavy handed dialogue and explanation.
The first example of how Hidden Figures takes this monumental task of portraying the accurate yet emotionally impactful hardship of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), is found in the expertly restrained opening scene. The film focuses on the hardship faced by the women immediately in their interaction with a White police officer in the middle of Georgia, a time that most of the audience knows could be very dangerous for Black people. Instead of having the officer be over the top aggressive with the women, the way in which most melodrama might attempt to draw out sympathy, the film takes a lighter approach. The girls flash their NASA IDs and shift the focus to the space race in order to avoid an escalating situation. Instead of invoking what could be an overly dramatic opening scene where the women are attacked and the audience is forced to feel sympathy, Hidden Figures shows the very real threat of racism, and then allows the personalities of the characters to naturally lead the scene elsewhere. This creates an emotional evocation without the misplaced comedy that might come from a quickly escalating opening scene.
All throughout Hidden Figures, emotion is evoked and moderated through the characters’ own experience of the events. Instead of feeling a disconnected outrage for Mary when she is forced to jump through several hoops to become an engineer, the audience feels the same anger turned motivation that Mary feels. The women are restrained in their own experience, and that serves well as a vehicle for the emotional stability of the film. Even in Katherine’s monologue (breathtakingly delivered by Henson) about being forced to walk miles across campus to use the only colored bathroom never veers too far that the audience becomes alienated. Instead, the audience deeply feels her emotions because she has restrained them in the face of the quiet discrimination since the beginning of her journey. The audience breaks just as quietly as she does.
More than just restraint in depicting and dealing with emotions, Hidden Figures expertly manages its realm of melodrama through balancing the intensity of life at NASA with the internal lives of the film’s heroines. The film is never bogged down by the hardship faced by the women because of the moments in which the women have freedom at home with their husbands, families and communities. The film is never disingenuous about their hardships at NASA because it allows the women moments to reveal their true thoughts and feelings about those hardships: like at lunch where Mary gripes about the new engineer qualifications or when Dorothy reminds her children that they’ve done nothing wrong. This balancing act of naturalism, or the real life strength and perseverance of the women, with the drama of space shuttles and looking potential racists in the eye and taking no for an answer, make for an almost resurgence of what melodrama has always intended to do.
That is to say, Hidden Figures is a melodrama only because it resists the tropes of the genre at every chance that it gets.
On the surface, it can certainly seem like the story of Hidden Figures is indeed fodder for a channel like Lifetime. In fact, in the hands of perhaps an unseasoned writer/director, it may have been. But because the film wound up in the hands of those who know that the best way to fight the traps of melodrama is with authenticity, Hidden Figures became the melodrama that fits perfectly alongside today’s highly regarded dramas.
