Air is a 2023 film that just dropped on Amazon this past weekend after a brief run in theatres. It has been a buzzy pre-summer title from a Best Picture winning director. The movie could be sold on its casting alone. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis, Chris Tucker are just the first that come to mind. Affleck really lets his rolodex shine here.
The plot is pretty straightforward, as it’s one of many recent releases that are basically just Wikipedia entries. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is a basketball guru working for Nike and trying to find and sign stars to a sponsorship deal. It’s hard to imagine from where we stand, but Nike basketball is in a distant third place to Converse and Addidas. Furthermore, we are led to believe that unless performance increases the entire basketball department is on the chopping block.
It’s at this point where Sonny decides they need to spend the entire budget chasing one real star, rather than just hoping one of the remaining scraps will work. He decides that Michael Jordan is the one.
Most people will know the ending of the movie. Nike signs Jordan. It’s widely successful, everyone makes a ton of money, and Jordan goes down as the best to ever do it. Fundamentally, the film is starting from a position of weakness. Either the characters need to be engaging enough that our knowledge of the end result doesn’t matter, or the specific details are so interesting that they transcend the end product.
The other way to bypass this difficulty is that the ride is so much fun that we don’t care about anything else. It becomes a hang out movie full of funny moments that make us laugh, stars we like giving good performances, and a popular brand at the center of the whole thing. This is the route I believe the movie aspired to.
Damon is playing his patented everyman, slightly overweight, divorced, focused on his career, with a slight Bogart-esque streak of the maverick. He’s is our guide through the entire story. While Damon and Batemen, to an extent, are busy doing the yeoman work of carrying a pre-determined story, much of the rest of the cast are given room to play.
Affleck, as Phil Knight (the CEO of Nike) gets to run around wearing crazy 80’s outfits, sit barefoot at his desk, and quote Buddhist mantras as a way of motivating his employees. Chris Tucker is just always funny and charismatic when on screen. Though, the real star of the supporting cast is Chris Messina playing Jordan’s agent Peter Falk. As the profane combustable agent he seems to be doing his best Ari Gold impression, and it looks like fun.
I think the movie wanted to be fun in this way, but in the end it lacked a stylistic flourish in the filmmaking to indicate any playfulness. Despite Messina and the Addidas coalition, the true center of Air was Vaccaro’s pursuit of Jordan. It was filled with a seriousness and emotional earnestness that felt a little hollow.
Perhaps it was the major speech by Damon, the emotional and dramatic climax of the movie. The pitch came off as a little too cute, a little too much - especially in the context us knowing how it all turned out. This is where draping drama onto the real story really broke down for me.
There had to be something special, some mix of magical Don Draper words to give Michael Jordan a reason to join Nike. The story demanded it. I mean, you can’t really make a movie where the solution to the problem is offering more money and incentives. That’s just a story of hollow capitalism. It was in this creation of the heroic saccharine speech that slew the White Whale where I abandoned ship.
“We need you in these shoes, not so you have meaning in your life, but so that we have meaning in ours.”
The movie could have been a 30 for 30 or a Wikipedia entry. Pulling together a mix of performers we all like under the hand of solid direction vaulted it into something more. Yet, there isn’t quite enough fun or style for it to really work.
Musical Pairing: North American Scum, LCD Soundsystem