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John Travolta’s original script served as a dramatic and dramatic bedtime story. It’s a one-hour special created for Apple TV, based on the loving but innocent Mad Men 60s, and narrated by Travolta himself.
It’s a thrill you’ll have to get used to – but if Alec Baldwin was acting, you’d think this was a Wes Anderson movie. It’s based on Travolta’s children’s book about his love of airplanes: a story about Jeff, an eight-year-old boy, who looks exactly like the son of a super-flight!
Jeff becomes interested in aviation in 1962 after taking an overnight flight to LA with his divorced mother on a fancy TWA flight, a “one-night trainer” that had already gained retro popularity thanks to the recent invention of the jet plane.
Clark Shotwell plays Jeff; Kelly Eviston-Quinnett plays his mother and Ella Bleu Travolta, John’s daughter, plays Doris, a 21-year-old manager (as she was known in those days) who falls in love with Jeff. (The film shows that he married her – a coming-of-age story, which probably needs its own film.)
Jeff is interested in all the excitement, while his mother is also interested in meeting a nice divorced man on a plane – and of course there is no shortage of wolf types on board ready to buy his mother Manhattan. Smoking on airplanes was unusual until the late 1960s.
Another type of movie – which feels like a story of John Cheever or Frank O’Hara – would have distinguished the rapture of Jeff with something false and interfered with his mother’s love life or his professional life: he is an actor, focused on Hollywood and the hope of fame.
However when Jeff and his mother have to stop at a hotel and Jeff sees his mother leaving someone else’s room, it doesn’t have to make him innocent. Jeff seems to know exactly what’s going on and takes it in stride.
It’s a fun, quirky adventure – more so, perhaps, than Travolta intended.
