By Jake Wilson
Air ★★
(M) 112 minutes
Say what you like about Ben Affleck, he’s willing to take risks. Not everyone would have jumped on board a movie about one of the most celebrated athletes of all time, in which the athlete in question barely appears as a character.
But that’s what we get in Air, which is directed by Affleck from a script by first-timer Alex Convery (on this evidence, a devout worshipper at the church of Aaron Sorkin). While not a Michael Jordan biopic in any sense, the film winds back the clock to show how a sponsorship deal he signed at the outset of his career led to the creation of a highly profitable line of sneakers.
From left: Matt Damon as Nike marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan and Ben Affleck as Nike CEO Phil Knight.Credit: Ana Carballosa/Amazon Studios
As the script tells us, these sneakers are little more than symbols: “A shoe is just a shoe, until someone steps into it.” Yet the man destined to step into the Air Jordans stays out of the picture, barring a few archival snippets and a cameo as a lanky figure lurking at the back of a shot, after the fashion of Jesus in Ben Hur.
The religiose overtones are one possible way into this peculiar movie, which is, literally speaking, the story of a prophet: Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike marketing executive responsible for bringing Jordan on board. He’s played by Affleck’s old crony Matt Damon in an array of polo shirts as the epitome of middle-class, middle-aged whiteness.
Sonny isn’t hip or athletic, but he knows basketball to the point of spending his off hours going over grainy VHS tapes of up-and-comers. He has no personal life, which has now become a convention in this kind of movie. Jordan is just another promising NBA rookie at this point, but Sonny is convinced he’s looking at a superstar in the making – an intuition we know will put him on the right side of history.
Sonny’s efforts to spread the good word occupy most of the film’s running time, allowing for endless Sorkin-style boardroom banter as he pitches his vision of the future to his sceptical colleagues. The line-up includes Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker and Affleck himself as Nike’s new-age CEO, outfitted with a suitably ridiculous perm to show he’s a good sport.
All this is delivered with a degree of rhythm and showmanship, if little subtlety: the period is evoked in the most obvious ways, with needle-drops that go from Blister in the Sun to the Beverly Hills Cop theme, and more shout-outs to then-current popular culture than you’d get in any movie actually shot in 1984.
The real awkwardness starts when Affleck tries to get serious, calling on Viola Davis as Jordan’s hard-nosed mother Deloris to validate the film’s vision (the actual Jordan reportedly suggested her for the role).
Deloris’ one-on-one negotiation session with Sonny, presented in over-dramatic close-ups, is meant to be a case of game recognising game. That might have been more persuasive if the filmmakers had found a reason for us to be interested in Sonny himself, or told us who he really is besides a basketball connoisseur.
Much worse is Sonny’s climactic plea to the Jordan family to come on board, implicitly paralleled with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech (I’m not kidding). The embarrassment is compounded by a sense that, in this moment, Affleck identifies himself with Jordan on some level, and seizes the opportunity to get a few things off his chest about the painful side of stardom.
There are ambiguities here, but it’s hard to judge how much the filmmakers are in control of that. Jordan is presented as a game-changing figure in a sense that goes beyond sport, insisting on being rewarded appropriately as earlier African-American star athletes were not. Yet, he’s also positioned as an absent figure whose basic role is to be purchased by one company or another.
Perhaps the film is not as straightforward an ode to corporate capitalism as it appears – as is perhaps hinted at in a throwaway exchange about Born in the USA, which turns out to be a different song once you listen to the lyrics. But even given the benefit of every possible doubt, Air is pretty thin.
Air is in cinemas from April 6.
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