Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Marlon Wayans, Chris Messina, Chris Tucker, Viola Davis
Director: Ben Affleck
Writer: Alex Convery
In a sense, Air could be considered an underdog sports movie. Only the subjects are not top athletes at peak physical condition, they’re a bunch of schlubby office executives who play their games not in stadiums and arenas but boardrooms and conference halls. They also work for a billion-dollar company, and so can only really be considered underdogs in the realm of Fortune 500 sporting brands, so take that for what it’s worth. But then, that’s what the 80s were all about, the Reaganite ideal of the hyper-individualistic and ambitious mavericks reaching greatness by being the best at what they do. If you aren’t yet the top dog, then you are the underdog. There are few who embody that ideal better than Space Jam star Michael Jordan, but what Alex Convey’s script proposes is that the same ideal can be extended, to a lesser but no less potent degree, to those in Jordan’s periphery. Air tells the story not of Jordan, but of the suits at Nike, Inc. who signed an unlikely deal with the then basketball rookie and designed the iconic sneaker that paved the way for Jordan to become the icon that he is today. It’s corporate propaganda that almost certainly bears no resemblance to the truth and plays into a quintessentially American kind of mythos but it does still make for a pretty entertaining movie.
Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is a talent scout working for Nike’s basketball division. Nike is performing at a distant third in the basketball shoe market after Converse and Adidas and is considering shutting the sector down altogether unless Sonny find and land a new spokesman who can turn things around. Normally Sonny will meet with marketing director Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) and discuss which new NBA prospects they reckon they can get with their $250,000 budget after their richer competitors have swept up the best of the bunch, but he has long since checked out and hardly cares enough to try anymore. But then a night of looking through the reels leads to an epiphany. Watching a young man called Michael Jordan, the third pick for this year’s NBA draft, land a career-making shot as if he were practicing in his own backyard, he realises that this kid has got ‘it’. Anybody can see he’s talented, but what Sonny comes to understand here is that Jordan is a star destined to become the greatest that’s ever been. And he’s pretty sure he’s the only one that understands this, which is why he proposes spending their entire budget on enlisting this one guy and betting Nike’s future on him. As part of his gambit, he concocts a plan to build an entire line of sneakers around their would-be mascot, a shoe that those watching today will recognise as perhaps the single most successful and iconic footwear in history.
Jordan himself is never directly depicted. He is played by a stand-in with his face kept out of view and the negotiations for his contract are instead conducted by his mother Deloris (Viola Davis, reportedly handpicked for the role by Jordan himself), the only other person besides Sonny who truly understands her son’s potential and worth. In a pivotal moment when Nike is making their ride-or-die pitch to the Jordan family, Sonny breaks away from the planned presentation to look Jordan in the eye and prophesy the trajectory his career will take. It is here that we see archival footage of the real Jordan during the many highs and lows that have yet to come, confirming that everything Sonny tells him is correct. It seems that by choosing not to directly depict a dramatised character of Jordan, the idea that Air has is to showcase Michael Jordan not as a man but as a myth, one that Nike had a small but crucial part in shaping. The way that the movie treats Jordan, spoken of with reverence and shrouded in mystery, he could almost be a religious figure. And, given the way basketball is prized in the USA, who’s to say that he isn’t? Air is essentially a movie about a bunch of guys who start off thinking that they are the heroes of their own stories, only to realise by the end that they are in fact small parts of someone else’s much larger story. One wonders if Convery and Affleck went through such an arc in making this film.
Though the movie may aspire to such lofty themes however, what Affleck has essentially made is a mostly straightforward picture. The story takes place in 1984 and feels very of that time. As well as checking off about every piece of 80s iconography under the sun, Air is a workplace drama about a bunch of guy who are very good at their jobs pulling off an unlikely feat. Hollywood used to produce movies like this all the time and Affleck seems almost nostalgic for a time when straightforward adult dramas without jedi or superheroes were plentiful. He is smart enough however not to be too nostalgic to the time itself, when free-market Reaganomics went into full swing and paved the way for, well… where we are now, and is socially aware enough to know that rooting for a $1 billion company to land the deal that will turn them into a $100 billion company is pretty silly. There is a nice sense of awareness in the movie’s approach to the tension between creativity and capitalism as it navigates these trappings. One scene has Rob observe how the patriotic Springsteen song he’s been jamming to recently turned out to be a bleak anthem about a blue-collar man being left to rot by his country, leading him to a larger point about exploitation in art and how easy it is to be ignorant about it when you’re caught up in the hype.
This is not an exceptional movie, but it is an interesting one that manages to do a lot with a little. It boasts a uniformly solid ensemble with Damon and Affleck, who plays Nike’s hip Buddhist CEO Phil Knight, making the most of their proven chemistry. Davis is a natural fit for the movie’s depiction of Deloris, a level-headed pragmatist with a cool demeanour, a nose for corporate bullshit, and a committed desire to do right by her son and safeguard his future, while Chris Messina steals scenes as Jordan’s obnoxious, foul-mouthed agent. The movie doesn’t have anything radical to say (the idea of Amazon releasing a film about a working man getting paid what he’s worth is already rich enough), but it holds together well enough and is perfectly watchable. It’s corporate propaganda, but it’s also quite an engaging story about a gambler who made the biggest play of his life not out of greed or recklessness but because he believed in something greater than himself. The movie does not depict Nike itself as being great but rather as a witness in the presence of greatness. A minor character is Peter Moore (Matthew Maher), the designer who actually created the first Air Jordan sneaker. He’s essentially just a cog in the machine, but he puts everything into making the perfect shoe and the result of his labour is a legend that outlived him, just as it will outlive everybody else involved.
★★★
Aled Warren Films 