Hollywood fixes capitalism, just like it used to do in the 1980s, with Air, the story of Nike getting together with basketball ace Michael Jordan to create the Air Jordan, the most popular sneaker of all time.
Like Jordan, it’s got the skills, is light on its feet and moves at pace, introducing first the era in its opening moments with the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing behind a montage of Ronald Reagan, Princess Diana, Rubik’s Cubes, The A Team, dial-up modems and Jane Fonda (workout era). Then, barely pausing for breath, it’s on to its dramatis personae – persona, really, since this story focuses hard on central character Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), the Nike employee who’s all passion and commitment in a company largely run by accountants. Sonny needs more money to get the big names. The accountants say no. No wonder Nike is way behind Converse and Adidas when it comes to getting famous basketball players to endorse its shoes.
That’s the nut this film is going to crack, the dragon it must slay – how to get Nike on to Michael Jordan’s feet, in spite of the fact that Sonny is fighting with one arm tied behind his back, and that Jordan is an Adidas kind of guy, and make Nike cool in the process.
The other guys – Ben Affleck as Nike co-founder Phil Knight, the Buddhist company boss whose furnaces no longer roar since he took the company public. Jason Bateman as the basketball division’s boss, a decent family man who’s also treading water. Chris Tucker as the ex player who now mostly does liaison with the mostly black players Nike is courting (Tucker, ever since Silver Linings Playbook, continues to play a blinder). Chris Messina as Jordan’s all mouth and trousers agent, a “fuck you twice” kind of guy whether it’s needed or not. And Viola Davis as Mrs Jordan, matriarch of the Jordan family and she who must be obeyed.
Everything about this film feels familiar, its characters, its language, its emotional arcs, its look, and Ben Affleck directs it as if he were remaking Nine to Five or Working Girl, with a commitment to making a 1980s movie. It only falters once, when Air breaks its own internal fourth wall with a reference to reshoring and globalisation – all these shoes are made Somewhere In Asia – which momentarily drags us back to the 21st century.
Apart from those, maybe five seconds, we are there, back in the era when tentpole movies aspired to be a bit of something for everybody, with music choices that are poptastic, explication done on the fly – Marlon Wayans enters, unloads a dumpster full of it and then twinklingly departs – in a screenplay by Ben Fountain and Jean-Christophe Castelli that must have made them smile as they wrote it. You might have seen Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which they also wrote. This mops the floor with that, possibly as a result of Damon and Affleck’s rewrites – the jury’s out on that one.
Damian Young, the actor playing Michael Jordan, is never seen face-on and never utters a word, emblematically underlining the passivity of many stars when it comes to business deals, leaving the actual work to agents and, in this case, family.
In any case Air is not about his character – Jordan is the destination, we’re with the guy travelling there.
This film packs a lot in – that Adidas is named after Adolf Dassler, onetime member of the Nazi party. That tennis star Arthur Ashe in a way sowed the endorsement seed that Jordan later reaped. That the Alan Parsons Project and Harold Faltermeyer were once forces in popular music. But through it all slinks the idea that businesses are built by the bold (entrepreneurs) and destroyed by the meek (accountants), that to win big you have to stake big. “You’re remembered for the rules you break,” boss Phil tells Sonny at one point, in the classic Hollywood moment the film has been building towards, as Sonny is finally given his head and goes for the big one. Slam dunk!
Air – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
