Songs and tears for Hidden Figures

TORONTO — With a free concert by Pharrell Williams and tearful appearances from the starry cast, the makers of Hidden Figures, the forthcoming film about black female mathematicians working at Nasa during Jim Crow, charmed public and private audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival while laying the groundwork for an Oscar campaign.

Inside a festival theatre, a few clips from the unfinished, fact-based film, being released by Fox, were shown. Afterwards, a few blocks away, Williams, one of the film’s producers, entertained a large crowd that thronged a blocked-off street and filled apartment balconies. With a full band and a small choir, he performed a few of the original songs he wrote for the soundtrack and managed to weave in references to the film, even dedicating one tune to the newly-anointed Fox chief, Stacey Snider. He later led fans in singing Happy Birthday to Taraji P Henson, a star of the film, who turned 46 on Sunday.

Before that, at the theatre, the screened scenes from Hidden Figures were warmly met, but it was the question-and-answer session that followed, with Henson as well as her co-stars Janelle Monae and Octavia Spencer, that fully won the audience over. The actresses were seeing the completed scenes for the first time, and Henson, for one, dabbed her eyes and proceeded to artfully hit all the right notes.

“I’m a girl from the hood, OK, I didn’t come from much, so all I had were dreams, and hope,” Henson said. “The reason why this is so overwhelming is because when you come from a place where you have no hope, all you know is that people like you don’t belong, or they have no place in society.”

Children of colour, Henson said, felt like all they could aspire to was sports, acting and rap. If she had known the story of the Nasa team growing up, she said, she might have aspired to become a rocket scientist.

“Not to say that I’ve had a bad journey,” she added, to laughter — she’s won a Golden Globe, among other awards, for her portrayal of Cookie in Empire. Then she apologised for being so teary and potentially ruining her makeup. “I should have been like Alicia Keys and take it all off, huh?” she asked. More laughter. Spencer got choked up too, lamenting that the real women she and Monae play both died before they could see the film.

Hidden Figures is scheduled for wide release in January but will have a smaller Oscar qualifying run in December, with its backers almost certainly eyeing the categories of best picture, best actress and best song. Its campaign potency is helped by its timing, as the Academy of Motion of Picture Arts and Sciences, still smarting from last season’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy, is striving to make its membership, and, perhaps by extension, their Oscars picks, more diverse.

Henson voiced the de rigueur campaign line that awards did not matter. She portrays a math savant, Katherine Johnson, who just turned 98, and who last year was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.

“People come up to me and say, oh Oscars, you know everybody wants to put on the pressure,” she said, “What I’m most concerned about was would Katherine be proud.” THE NEW YORK TIMES