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 at 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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