Chemistry has always been Hollywood’s secret sauce, and, for rom-coms at least, the high-water mark remains the pairing of Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Most cineastes can name their first collaboration (Pillow Talk in 1959), but the others — Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964) — don’t come to mind so quickly. As a brand, though, these two have more than endured in pop culture, and writers and directors have had to work harder and harder to find a way to recapture that magic, since we now know very well that it requires a great deal more than just putting a couple of good-looking famous people together.
Peyton Reed came close in 2003’s with his stylish, early-’60s period pastiche Down with Love, casting Renee Zellweger alongside Ewan McGregor, and Olivia Wilde certainly did not with 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling, lumbering Florence Pugh with Harry Styles in a risible ’50s-themed sci-fi. Fly Me to the Moon, however, might be the best challenge recently mounted, even if so much faith is placed in the central casting of Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum that, aside from an enjoyably offbeat cameo by Woody Harrelson, there are pretty much no substantial supporting roles. Like, any. At all.
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From the outset, Greg Berlanti’s film roots itself in the real world of the ’60s space race, using archive footage to place where the USA was at the end of the decade. In 1961, the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin became the first man up there, sparking an immediate bidding war with the U.S. for proprietorship of the moon. As the years wore on, however, this once-exciting but vastly expensive competition lost its sheen with the public, initially after the shocking assassination of JFK in 1963 but especially once the Vietnam War took hold soon after — PR issues that were skirted by Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 but not Damien Chazelle’s First Man.
Public burnout with NASA is at the heart of Fly Me to the Moon, which starts, unexpectedly, with a Mad Men-style intro that finds our heroine, Kelly Jones (Johansson), arriving to pitch to an advertising company on Madison Avenue. “Wrong room, we don’t need dictation,” they tell her, saying the quiet part out loud in the sexist spirit of the time. Kelly, however, carries on, with her presentation — selling sports cars to men, in a roomful of men — that is so successful, it seems that she needn’t have bothered with the fake pregnancy bump that she is wearing as a kind of backup plan to elicit sympathy.
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Kelly is pretty good at this kind of thing, which is why, that night in a bar, she meets a spook (Harrelson) who introduces himself as Moe Berkus. Berkus seems to know all about Kelly and brings up the offer of a high-powered job, which she balks at, claiming not to have the experience. “Face like that,” says Berkus, “who’s gonna check references? You have a singular talent — why waste it selling cars?”
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The product, he says, is the moon, since the government is desperate to re-energize the space program and not only win the propaganda war with the USSR but give the depressed American people something to root for. Kelly is in almost immediately, flying to Cocoa Beach in Florida with her not-so-enthusiastic assistant, an anti-Nixon peacenik. On her first night, eating solo at a nearby diner, Kelly meets Cole Davis (Tatum), a seasoned pilot who — much like one of the real-life characters from Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff — has seen his own ambitions to become an astronaut thwarted and now operates behind the scenes.
They flirt, quite innocently, and Cole, after naively oversharing his attraction to her, is stunned when she turns up at his workplace the next day. Kelly is unfazed and sets about her work like a woman possessed. Flipping the Hudson-Day playbook, Cole is the hustled and Kelly the hustler, which is where the film is at its strongest: Kelly wants to sell the hell out of the upcoming Apollo 11 launch — from wristwatches to underwear and breakfast cereal — but the uptight, nerdy Cole, who clearly wears a vest underneath his stylish, pastel-colored turtlenecks, wants to preserve its integrity. Billy Wilder would have had a lot of fun with this set-up, and there’s a little bit of his 1961 comedy One Two Three here as Cole struggles with this whirlwind that’s now disrupting his ordered life.
Up to this point, there’s a geniality that drives everything forward, an acknowledgment that it did take a lot to win back the favor of American politicians, in the high heat of 1969 especially. But the blurring of fact and fiction soon becomes a bit uncomfortable; the catastrophic fate of Apollo 1 is not terribly tactfully handled, and the film plays into conspiracy theory territory when Berkus forces Kelly to make contingency plans if Apollo 11 fails (which involves filming a fake moon landing without Cole knowing and lots of jokes about Stanley Kubrick being unavailable). This way, explains Berkus, “Everybody gets what they want, and the world doesn’t have to sleep under a Communist moon.”
But will everyone else get what they want? In its favor, Johansson and Tatum — in perhaps their most weaponized comedic roles since Hail, Caesar! — really do make a great team, which is the main box ticked and will likely be the biggest draw for audiences, especially when it moves from theaters onto Apple TV+. This dazzling partnership doesn’t leave a lasting impression, however. Thanks to its increasingly wayward plotting and thoroughly distracting manipulation of known history in the pursuit of ever more ridiculous laughs, Fly Me to the Moon winds up more screwy than screwball, leaving the door wide open, yet again, for the next crack at that old-school Hollywood chemistry thing.
Title: Fly Me to the Moon
Studio: Apple Original Films
Release date: July 12, 2024 (Columbia Pictures)
Director: Greg Berlanti
Screenwriter: Rose Gilroy
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Jim Rash, Anna Garcia, Donald Elise Watkins, Noah Robbins, Colin Woodell, Christian Zuber, Nick Dillenburg, Ray Romano, Woody Harrelson
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 2 hr 12 min
