Air
There’s an air of the recondite in Ben Affleck’s telling of Nike’s struggle to turn around its fortunes in 1984.
A seat at the table? Matt Damon with Viola Davis
Essentially, Ben Affleck’s fifth film as director is about a shoe, the Air Jordan. But as Jason Bateman’s marketing honcho Rob Strasser at Nike says, “a shoe is just a shoe – until someone steps into it.” And that someone is Michael Jordan, possibly the greatest athlete who has ever lived. He was certainly the greatest basketball player and his endorsement of a trainer had the heft to make or break a $919 million company. But Jordan had yet to prove himself and already Adidas and Converse were baying for his advocacy. The year is significant and Affleck makes 1984 a key player in his slick, niche sports drama, which skirts around the sport just as his camera circles around his key players. And so we have a rousing intro set to Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’ featuring shots of Beverly Hills Cop, Sting and The Police, Trivial Pursuit, Ghostbusters and a Rubik's Cube.
The protagonist in the strictest sense is Sonny Vaccaro, “a middle-aged fat white guy” played by Matt Damon, the Oliver Hardy to Ben Affleck’s Nike CEO Stan Laurel (this is their ninth film together). Nike is suffering substantial losses and heads are set to roll unless there is a seismic shift in the company’s circumstances. As a caption proclaims at the start, Nike only makes up 17% of the sports shoe market, just as the trainer is becoming a staple item of footwear – and even a status symbol. As Sonny, Nike’s talent scout, struggles to justify his position – and to save his job – he risks his future on a hunch. He has “a feeling”, and by acting on it he breaks business protocol by bypassing Jordan’s agent David Falk (a terrific Chris Messina) and pitching up at the door of the Jordan’s family home in Wilmington, North Carolina. It is there that he appeals directly to the baseball player’s wily mother, Deloris Jordan (a terrific Viola Davis). Like Sonny, she cares little for the rules, just what will best serve her son.
While the film was given Michael Jordan’s blessing, he is strangely absent in the main action, with a mute Damian Young merely filling the space where Jordan would have been at any given time. It is a jarring effect, but no less so than the lack of any personal backstory in the lives of the main characters, who only operate in the space of the Nike headquarters in Oregon. This makes Air an oddly impersonal drama, with Alex Convery’s dialogue no match for the snappy, idiosyncratic discourse of an Aaron Sorkin or Martin McDonagh script. There’s no reason why the story of a shoe cannot be as exciting or as gripping as David O. Russell’s dip into commercial enterprise with Joy, the character-driven story of the invention of the ‘Miracle Mop.’ Air is more likely to appeal to fans of basketball than the rest of the world, although Affleck does bring a degree of polish to the proceedings. As such, it is as much the story of risk and self-belief as it is about corporate wheeler-dealing – but it could have been so much more.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Marlon Wayans, Chris Messina, Chris Tucker, Viola Davis, Matthew Maher, Jay Mohr, Julius Tennon, Dan Bucatinsky, Gustaf Skarsgård, Barbara Sukowa, Joel Gretsch, Damian Young, Gabrielle Bourne, Jackson Damon.
Dir Ben Affleck, Pro David Ellison, Jesse Sisgold, Jon Weinbach, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Madison Ainley, Jeff Robinov, Peter Guber and Jason Michael Berman, Screenplay Alex Convery, Ph Robert Richardson, Pro Des François Audouy, Ed William Goldenberg, Costumes Charlese Antoinette Jones, Sound Ai-Ling Lee.
Amazon Studios/Skydance Sports/Artists Equity/Mandalay Pictures-Warner Bros.
111 mins. USA. 2023. UK and US Rel: 5 April 2023. Cert. 15.
