Romantic comedies tend to get a lot of flack thanks to their perennial association with the Hallmark machine, but in the right hands, they can be an artistic force to be reckoned with.
Such is very much the case for Fly Me to the Moon, the Greg Berlanti-directed period piece produced by and starring one Scarlett Johansson. Those of you who paid attention to the theatrical ins and outs this summer may have caught wind of this one back in July, but a paltry $42 million against its $100 million budget may suggest otherwise. In any case, it’s finally made it to streaming, where its hearty, charming merits can be more readily feasted upon by a wider audience.
Per who you ask, all three of these films count as rom-coms.
Fly Me to the Moon stars Johansson as Kelly Jones, an advertising executive with razor-sharp wit and an eye for people, who’s enlisted to help repair the relationship between the American public and NASA; a relationship that’s vital to the country’s success in the Space Race. Here, she meets Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), the launch director of the Apollo 11 mission who takes his job very seriously and is none too pleased about the marketing tactics Kelly uses to prop up NASA’s image. The romantic tension of course becomes too powerful for them, but they nevertheless end up clashing when Kelly’s job is brought to the front of staging a fake moon landing, just in case things go south with the real one.
Interestingly, Tatum’s role was originally going to be filled by Johansson’s MCU co-star Chris Evans, but had to drop out due to scheduling issues; a changeup that single-handedly ruined the lives of everyone who was hinging on a bootleg Black Widow-Captain America romance for their next endorphin hit.
What makes Fly Me to the Moon such a narratively intelligent film is that it understands the importance of putting the romance between Kelly and Cole on the backburner, and instead focusing on the romance inherent to their individual humanity, as well as the romance between the American public and NASA.
This is to say that the thesis of Fly Me to the Moon lies in extrapolating the beauty of something without completely disregarding its less savory components. Cole and Kelly are both severely flawed people who are driven by trauma and unfortunate circumstances, but their maladaptation had a direct hand in bringing the best parts of themselves to life as well. Similarly, no secret is made of the manipulative role that marketing plays in most any relationship between citizens and the institutions they live in, but Fly Me to the Moon doesn’t count out the genuine emotional positives that something like the Space Race — a then-culmination of humanity’s scientific and cooperative potential — might spark in the public, either.
The whole thing is held together by a pair of decisive turns from Johansson and Tatum, whose combined comedic timing, snappy dialogue delivery, and physicality could have made the film watchable just on its own, but thanks to Rose Gilroy’s script, there’s hardly a problem to be had here, Houston.
Published: Dec 8, 2024 02:06 pm