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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FLY ME TO THE MOON CRASHES BACK DOWN TO EARTH  
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Eileen Jones
July 18, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson try to win the 1969 space
race in Fly Me to the Moon. But its heavy-handed history lessons ruin
the fun. _

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in Fly Me to the Moon. ,
(Columbia PIctures)

 

What a _weird_ movie.

_Fly Me to the Moon, _marketed as a bright, luxe, starry romantic
comedy set during the United States vs. Russia space race and the
Apollo 11 launch of 1969_,_ is tottering
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the box-office and getting very mixed reviews full of speculation
about why it doesn’t work. But the film is so odd in its clash of
genre formulae, and so essentially conservative in its outlook while
featuring a bizarre use of some of the grimmer historical elements of
’69, it becomes a fascinating snapshot of our own wacko ideological
moment in time.

This $100 million would-be rom-com stars Scarlett Johansson as top
advertising rep Kelly Jones, who dazzles stolidly chauvinistic male
clients with her curvaceous beauty and era-appropriate perkiness while
going sharklike after success by any means necessary. She’s
approached by an equally sharklike government op in the newly elected
Nixon administration named Moe Burkus (Woody Harrelson), who coerces
her into taking on the peculiar job of “selling” NASA and the
Apollo 11 mission to a public disillusioned by failed moon launches
and a Congress that’s about to pull NASA’s funding.

It seems that Moe Burkus (not his real name) knows that Kelly Jones
(not _her_ real name) is a former con artist desperate to keep her
shady past a secret now that she’s found a career in advertising, a
legal way to pull the kind of lying scams she was taught at her
mother’s knee. The long con that Burkus wants Jones to run is
secretly producing a film of a faked moon landing, which is supposedly
going to be televised only in the event that the Apollo 11 mission
fails.

But the money’s good, and the blackmail is effective, so Kelly takes
the job. We can’t help but like Kelly — the inherent lovability of
the screwball-comedy heroine is a long-standing cinematic tradition.
There’s a lot of that genre in this film’s whole setup, if you
think of such masters as Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Preston
Sturges. They were all sophisticates when it came to human foibles
and, shall we say, our pervasive moral and ethical flexibility.
Sturges in particular operated on the cheerfully cynical assumption
that all politics and systems of power were corrupt through and
through. And having the scintillating screwball woman be utterly at
home in this modern world of fast-talking, ethically variable,
ultra-persuasive role-play, complete with impromptu identities and
accents — all while dragging the stodgy traditional male along for
the ride — is definitely typical of screwball.

Which brings us to the frequently stodgy, traditional male in the
screwball scenario. In this case it’s Channing Tatum as Cole Davis,
a stiff straight arrow and stalwart conservative true believer who’s
managing the Apollo 11 space mission. A former Air Force pilot who
lost his chance to be an astronaut because of a slight AFib condition,
he’s still haunted by the disastrous 1967 Apollo 1 mission he
oversaw that killed the entire crew. He hangs around out front at
NASA, personally tending the plants around the tribute to the late
astronauts, which gives you some idea of his guilt.

If you’re thinking this sounds a little heavy for impious,
effervescent, forward-thinking screwball comedy — or even its
somewhat weightier, more traditional sister, romantic comedy — you
are so right. There are several of these dramatic, historical lead
sinkers dropped into the comic souffle, which had me saying aloud to
the screen more than once, “What are you _doing_?” (It was okay
— I was alone. Not a lot of people lined up to see this thing.)

Some mad determination to represent the calamitous real-life events of
the late 1960s has screenwriter Rose Gilroy and director Greg Berlanti
including mentions of all the political assassinations, as well as
shots of TV footage of the Vietnam War. Watching the latter gives
Kelly Jones the idea that what people will want, as a result of seeing
such unprecedented footage of warfare, is a live feed of the Apollo 11
moon landing. Presuming the spaceship doesn’t blow up on the
launching pad.

Kelly’s Vietnam War–related notion is only one of a barrage of
promotional brainstorms she comes up with, and it’s treated with
amazing lightness among ad tie-ins such as the astronauts wearing
Omega watches, their photos on cereal boxes, and the invention of
Tang, the supposed energy-boosting space drink that rotted the teeth
of a generation. Soon NASA is beloved by the public again, and Kelly
wins over crucial political support with the same ad-libbing aplomb.
She sweet-talks an old-time Southern senator, for example, by putting
on a Georgia accent, claiming to be a graduate of Georgia Tech, and
pretending she’ll be heartbroken if the senator, her personal hero
who spoke at her graduation, pulls his support for the space mission.

Marveling at her sophistry, Cole’s fellow NASA staffer Henry Smalls
(Ray Romano) mutters, “It’s scary. Tears actually came to her
eyes.”

In certain screwball comedies, such as _My Man Godfrey_ (1936)
or _Bringing Up Baby_ (1936), the “madcap” woman character’s
ability to navigate crazy modern reality by making a kind of
delightful though hazardous game of it would ultimately provide an
education for the “hapless” traditional man, weighted down by
convention. She would enable him to get imaginative liftoff by
embracing a new form of daffy, high-living, companionable coupledom.

In other screwball comedies, there’s a trade-off, with each side of
the livelier-stodgier divide learning from the other as they move
toward love and a reconceived modern marriage. Director Frank Capra,
especially, insisted on an increased reverence for the conventional
Boy Scout qualities of the leading man. The smarter, livelier,
ultramodern woman, in his films, got entranced by the virtuous
old-fashioned hick. So much so that, after Capra pioneered the
screwball form with _It Happened One Night_ (1935), he maneuvered
himself right out of the genre again with films like _Mr. Deeds Goes
to Town_ (1936) and _Mr. Smith Goes to Washington_ (1939).
Capra’s screwball-adjacent films are known in critical and scholarly
circles as “populist comedies.” (Though “Capracorn” was the
funnier term in the vernacular.)

Preston Sturges, obsessed with Capra’s legacy and often critiquing
it furiously in his own films, took Capra’s Boy Scout hero and had
him pulled through knotholes by the heroine and by chaotic American
reality as Sturges saw it, as you can witness in films like _The Lady
Eve _(1941),_ The Palm Beach Story _(1942), and _The Miracle of
Morgan’s Creek _(1944).

But sadly, we’re in more of a Capra-descended era than a Preston
Sturges one, still hanging onto a weird reverence for old-school
heroics. And Channing Tatum’s Cole Davis is what you get if you
remove all the humorous charm of a Capra hero as played by James
Stewart or Gary Cooper, leaving only the heavy “virtues” of
militant patriotic fervor and zealously unimaginative truth-telling
and pompous self-righteousness. Cole is a pious Korean War veteran and
all-around flag waver in 1969, when a refusal to at least question
that rigid point of view is actually a repulsive trait.

Only at the very end of _Fly Me to the Moon_ is Cole is persuaded by
the otherwise repentant Kelly to cooperate in bending the truth a bit,
one time only, in order to save the Apollo 11 mission. Thereafter, she
vows, both are going to be truth-telling straight arrows. It’s
depressing beyond words to contemplate their square suburban
existences going forward.

The lead actors bring all they can to their roles. Johansson, always a
compelling performer and one who seems to get more sensational-looking
every year is such a star she really should have more great film roles
to demonstrate why. Woody Harrelson has so patented his upbeat,
grinning, oddball edginess, he can stroll through his part without
effort. Ray Romano, very touching as wry, decent, low-key Henry
Smalls, is always a good character actor, so I’m not sure why I
still feel surprised every time I rediscover it.

Which leaves Channing Tatum as the only one who really suffers from
miscasting. Without being able to deploy his fundamentally humorous
sensibility, which balances out his absurd muscle-bound hunkiness and
makes him lovable, he’s lost. His star quality is so squelched by
his role of a humorless square, he never looks comfortable. And he’s
been done no favors in terms of his appearance here either. The
flat-top haircut looks greasily slicked down. And the tight,
short-sleeved, knit turtleneck sweaters he wears in bright colors like
peacock blue and canary yellow look conspicuously strange in a sea of
NASA tech men in white button-down shirts and black ties. Why the hell
would this conservative project manager, running the whole show back
in those days, be dressed in this mad-casual, lounge-lizard way?

In the end, we’re supposed to love the idea that quick-thinking,
independent, irreverent highflier Kelly Jones is redeemed and tamed by
the love of a supposedly good man, the dense, stolid, plodding,
conservative male mannequin Cole Davis, as if we were still living in
the year 1955. If we’ve got to do this throwback nostalgia stuff,
couldn’t we at least embrace the destabilizing possibilities of the
year 1969, when the movie’s set?

But no. There’s an automatic reset to the conservative’s dream
decade of the 1950s that’s infiltrated the cultural imagination of
this country. It’s like a paralyzing toxin that prevents forward
movement, and we appear to be stuck with it forevermore.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

 

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