And the award for the year’s most tonally bizarre movie goes to… this bafflingly conceived romantic dramedy, which swings wildly between gimmicky glibness and overwrought emotion as its love story becomes lost in space.
Fly Me to the Moon focuses on the lead-up to the Moon landing. Scarlett Johansson plays Kelly, a Madison Avenue ad whizz with a dark secret in her past, who’s sent to Florida to head up Nasa’s public affairs unit and remind Americans how much they used to love the cosmos. Channing Tatum is the launch director, Cole, a war hero with a heart defect, haunted by the lives lost on Apollo 1 and unconvinced by the need for marketing.
If that sounds like an incomprehensible melange of the trivial and the tragic, then you’re right. The movie begins like a pastiche of a breezy Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy, and yet keeps bringing up the Vietnam War. At one point it segues from the hero haplessly pursuing his feline adversary – a sequence that wouldn’t look out of place in That Darn Cat! (1965) – to him silently paying tribute to lost comrades.
The obstacles it places in the path of romance are also supremely strange. In one particularly perplexing scene, Cole is browbeaten by a journalist about his failures concerning Apollo 1, and then criticised by Kelly for having the temerity to lose his temper.
All of that, though, is merely a precursor to the main business, which sees our heroine blackmailed by a shadowy governmental figure (Woody Harrelson, obviously) into faking footage of the Moon landing. Yet just as we’re not always sure where we sit in the haphazardly developed love story, so the stakes of such fakery are poorly established.
The need for Kelly to keep the project secret also compounds one of the movie’s main shortcomings. At one point near the close, Cole says to her, “I haven’t seen you around lately,” and that’s rather the problem. The film is apparently endless – there is no reason on Earth for it to last 132 minutes – and yet its leads don’t spend nearly enough time together.
When they do, Fly Me to the Moon can be quite enjoyable. Yes, that central relationship feels oddly sexless, but its soppier moments are nicely done. The best comes early on, when Cole decides to just tell Kelly how beautiful she is, and the camera lingers on her face in the aftermath, as she digests his intervention.
The film’s terrific song-score, consisting largely of 60s soul tracks (Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack, Aretha Franklin) also helps half-convince you you’re having fun. And if the hit-rate of the gags isn’t high – incorporating such dusty antiques as someone pretending to be from the South, and the introduction of a camp, pretentious film director (the usually excellent Jim Rash descending into cliché) – the ones that do land are a joy.
But while the movie can work in the moment, such moments seem to float in a vacuum. It is ultimately a $100m triumph of period production design that feels at least two script drafts away from balancing its frankly weird assortment of reference points, ideas and emotions.