Fly Me To The Moon (2024) feels like a film made by committee. A film where studio executives had the final say. Everything is played safe and nothing at all is taken all that seriously. The history is speculative and played as gentle camp. Fly Me To The Moon offers charm, mild escapism and a little bit of heart and that’s all. Any and all deeper meanings or potential inferences are buried in a busy script.
Yet, despite the mediocrity of the film, there is what Manny Farber termed “termite art” in Fly Me To The Moon. This redeeming facet exists in the image of actress Scarlett Johansson. Her performance is endearing and playful, but it is her image that sells the film. Johansson’s natural beauty and the work of hair, make up and costume specialists all coalesce to create a perfect picture of contemporary womanhood seen through the filter of the late sixties.
Johansson looks like a mix of Jean Seberg and Doris Day. She isn’t a pin-up queen or a housewife, but something in the middle. Johansson’s agency and autonomy in Fly Me To The Moon is often challenged but never surrendered and she looks the part. She possesses all of Doris Day’s feminine wholesomeness and Seberg’s radicalism. Johansson is a new breed of womanhood circa the sixties designed specifically for 2024.
As an image set, Johansson redeems the film and more precisely, her character. Johansson is imagined as a synthesis of archetypes ripped from the small screen of Mad Men. This leaves the actress trying to bring authentic life to a two-dimensional paint-by-numbers character. Her image is all that is necessary though neither she nor the filmmakers explore it all that thoroughly.
Ideally Fly Me To The Moon would have had the wisdom to just point the camera at Johansson all made-up and allowed her to perform a monologue pitching all of her character’s ideas for NASA. Fly Me To The Moon begs to be distilled to this singular feminist image. The whole film flirts with this idea of feminism but is too “safe” to commit to it.
As is, Johansson as a social and political signifier is lost in a sea of generic gestures and saccharine platitudes. In the end there is no room for something as dynamic as Johansson the image in a film obsessed with soliciting laughs and knowing smiles. Fly Me To The Moon is , on the whole, diverting but lacking real substance.
