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Film Reviews

Fly Me to the Moon

Published July 19, 2024
Kelly & Cole locked in a typically passionate embrace

It’s said that Marguerite Duras’s brief for Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) was to script a love story that would not appear inconsiderable alongside the dropping of the Atomic bomb. She succeeded so well with this unthinkable task that Alain Renais’s film is recognised as a cinema classic.

Scriptwriter, Rose Gilroy, seems to have been given the less daunting job of writing a romcom that would be thought charming in the context of the 1969 lunar landing. In Fly Me to the Moon, she almost succeeds. If this historically oriented comedy doesn’t quite hit the mark it’s not down to Scarlett Johansson, who is in supreme form as Kelly Jones, an advertising maestra with a full box of tricks and a shady past. The problem lies with her love interest, Channing Tatum, as Cole Davis, launch director of the Apollo 11 mission, and a formidable wet blanket.

In this would-be screwball comedy, Johansson and Tatum are meant to be updated versions of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, or perhaps even Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Nowadays we know both Rock and Cary were gay, but they had a crackling chemistry with their female leads that Tatum cannot match. We understand that in any romcom the course of true love requires many twists and turns, but Tatum’s character is so maudlin, so self-denying we begin to think of him as a big boofhead unworthy of the charismatic Kelly.

It’s partly a question of costuming. Kelly always looks a million dollars in her ‘60s wardrobe, but Cole, for some strange reason, is decked out in skin-tight, turtle-necked, coloured T-shirts, even though his hundreds of underlings wear office shirts and ties. Rather than distinguishing him as a self-confident boss who can disregard dress codes, he looks like someone who has come to the office ready for the weekend. His thoughts are dominated by unassuaged feelings of guilt and shame over the Apollo 1 disaster, even though NASA is now working on Apollo 11. It’s not at all sexy.

The lack of sexual content adds to the retro feel of the movie. Although the entire saga hinges on Kelly and Cole’s smouldering, perpetually delayed passion for each other, their liaison is as chaste as a 60s TV sitcom. There’s less titillation than an old episode of Bewitched or I Dream of Genie. Think of Johansson as an updated version of Elizabeth Montgomery or Barbara Eden.

The premise of Greg Berlanti’s movie is that NASA is worried it is in danger of losing the space race unless it can win the approval of the American public and a group of sceptical politicians. Their solution is to hire some high-powered marketing talent in the form of Kelly, who has come to the attention of a slightly sinister government operative, Mo Berkus (Woody Harrelson). Using carrot-and-stick methods, with a hint of blackmail, Mo convinces Kelly to take on the job of selling the Moon launch.

Upon arriving in Florida, even before setting foot on the base, Kelly has a brief, random encounter with Cole at a diner, and he is instantly smitten. He’ll spend the next hour denying his attraction, as Kelly tries to package NASA for a mass audience, and he strives to keep it under wraps.

Naturally it’s Kelly who wins every round, until she is given a new top secret assignment by Mo, who wants her to find a director to fake a successful Moon landing, in case the real one is a flop. The Nixon administration has decided there is too much national prestige at stake to take any risks.

By this stage Kelly is a true believer in the mission, and it is with extreme reluctance she calls in her one-time protégé, Lance Vespertine – a camp, irrascible Jim Rash – to direct the bogus landing. But while Lance is dedicating his artistic talents to the task, Kelly has tipped off the NASA engineers, who are trying to ensure it’s the real event that makes the TV screens, not the the simulacre.

This idea finds its roots in the wellknown conspiracy theory that NASA faked the Moon landing with help from Stanley Kubrick, who scores a few gratuitous references. (Lance is known as “the Kubrick of commercials”). It’s a shaky platform for a movie, although nobody should expect profundity from a romcom.

Berlanti is not concerned wth plausibiity, he wants us to be seduced by the characters, the stop-start romance, the mix of ‘60s fashions and music. The soundtrack is packed with classic hits, the big moment between Kelly and Cole being fuelled by the Bee Gees singing To Love Somebody. Any deficiencies in the story are papered over by the sentimental power of pop and soul music.

Because this is a romcom, we know from their first meeting that Kelly and Cole will eventually get together. Because everybody knows Apollo 11 made it to the Moon, there’s no suspense in that regard. The success of the film hinges on the central relationship between the two leads, which doesn’t quite work, along with the efforts of a lively supporting cast. Woody Harrelson leads the way, with his jokey but menacing secret service guy. Anna Garcia gets a few good lines as Ruby, Kelly’s loyal assistant, but Ray Romano who plays Cole’s right-hand man, Henry, is almost as gloomy as his boss.

Overall, it’s entertaining, lightweight fare, with Scarlett Johansson being by far the major reason for attendance. The humour works best in Kelly’s efforts to win over advertisers and relcalcitrant senators, one of whom is played by Johansson’s real-life husband, Colin Jost. As all Hollywood movies nowadays inevitably come with a link to present day politics, the moral of the story is: truth counts. In the context of this year’s American election campaign that’s an excellent foundation for comedy.

 

 

 

Fly Me to the Moon

Directed by Greg Berlanti

Written by Rose Gilroy, story by Keenan Flynn & Bill Kirstein,

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Anna Garcia, Woody Harrelson, Jim Rash, Ray Romano, Noah Robbins, Donald Elise Watkins, Christian Clemenson, Colin Jost

USA/UK, M, 132 mins

 

Published in the Australian Financial Review, 20 June, 2024