Ben Affleck (2023)
The true story of how in 1984 Nike tried to persuade Michael Jordan – an eighteen-year-old rising star of basketball and already a commercial hot property – to endorse their sports shoes. We know from the start of Air that Nike will succeed – even those of us who, like me, sit down to watch it in almost complete ignorance of Jordan and the brands he represented during his stellar career. We know because it’s instantly clear that Air itself is a well-known movie brand – an underdog story leading to eventual, unlikely triumph: on-screen text at the start explains that, in 1984, Nike, though hardly a minnow in other departments, enjoyed only a 17% share of the basketball sneakers market, way behind Converse (54%) and Adidas (29%). As a sports-based drama, Ben Affleck’s is somewhat distinctive because the achiever of against-the-odds success is, rather than an athlete, a basketball talent scout. The film has a few things in common with Moneyball (2011) (both demonstrate, for a start, that a sports movie is easier to enjoy if you know nothing about the sport in question so have no idea if the film-makers are getting things wrong). Affleck’s protagonist, Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), isn’t as complex or interesting a character as Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane, the baseball coach whose story Bennett Miller tells in Moneyball. Thanks chiefly to its predestined storyline, Air as a whole doesn’t stand comparison with Miller’s unusually rich exploration of success and failure in the world of team sport. But Affleck has made a brisk, highly entertaining picture that raises the spirits for reasons beyond Sonny’s finally sealing the deal with the Jordan family.
The measly market share means Nike is on the verge of shutting down its basketball shoe operations. In a last shot at changing their fortunes, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Phil Knight (Ben Affleck), gives Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), his head of marketing, $250,000 to invest in three names from the current year’s National Basketball Association draft, names to endorse and advertise Nike shoes. Sonny, a member of Rob’s team, argues hard for them instead to concentrate on a single player, Michael Jordan, even though his senior colleagues are sure Jordan is an unrealistic proposition: it’s well known he’s keen to hook up with Adidas who, unlike Nike, can offer bigger bucks and additional inducements to sign with them. Sonny’s stubbornly convinced not only of Jordan’s exceptional potential but also that Nike can offer something different from their competitors by designing a shoe specifically for him. After talking with his friend George Raveling (Marlon Wayans), one of Jordan’s coaches on the US team in the recent Los Angeles Olympics, Sonny is sufficiently encouraged to go above his bosses’ heads: he gets on a plane, turns up at the Jordans’ home in Wilmington, North Carolina, and sits down to talk with Michael’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis) who, with her husband James (Julius Tennon), is leading the negotiations on their son’s behalf. Back at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, designer Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) comes up with a prototype ‘Air Jordan’ shoe. Phil Knight, though exasperated by Sonny’s impulsive tactics, agrees to spend the whole quarter-million-dollar budget on trying to net Jordan. Sonny and Rob work round the clock on a pitch for their do-or-die meeting with the Jordans …
The screenplay by Alex Convery is his first, according to IMDb, and it’s also first-rate – efficiently constructed, replete with good dialogue. Although most of the characters inhabit the same hectic, fast-talking environment, Convery gives them plausibly individual voices. In the main role, Matt Damon is middle-aged, overweight and excellent. Convery gives Sonny Vaccaro hardly any backstory and we see he has next to no personal life yet he’s never a clichéd, married-to-his-work obsessive, even when immersed in trying to win the Jordans over. Sonny’s very perceptive about the sport that gives him a living: Damon conveys this credibly as he watches then rewinds then watches again videos of basketball games and Michael Jordan’s contribution to them. Sonny’s pivotal speech to Jordan and his parents is a masterly piece of acting. Damon blurs the line between a salesman trying to sell and passionate sincerity – until Sonny’s evident need for the pitch to succeed becomes a proof of his sincerity.
Although Ben Affleck orchestrates his cast admirably, his own performance is the film’s least satisfying. He tries hard but you can feel the effort, especially when Phil Knight is imparting Buddhist wisdom (Sonny describes it in less respectful terms). This anxiously self-assertive CEO philosopher is meant to be a true eccentric but Affleck doesn’t have an eccentric bone in his body. It’s also immediately obvious that his frizzy gingery hairdo is an attempt to replicate the actual Phil Knight (this is confirmed in a closing photograph of the latter). As Rob Strasser, Jason Bateman delivers his cynical lines with impeccable deadpan timing; over the weekend before the crucial meeting, when he and Sonny have no choice but to spend a lot of hours together and Rob opens up about his failed marriage and how little he gets to see his daughter, Bateman gives a sense of the sad self-reproach that underlies and is expressed in his illusion-free patter. When the deal is finally done and Rob enters a room of wildly celebrating colleagues, Bateman makes his giddy disbelief touching.
Chris Messina is Jordan’s driven, expletive-prone agent, David Falk – who is, determinedly, consumed by his lucrative work to the exclusion of friendships outside it. Messina was a familiar face in high-profile films of the late 2000s and early 2010s (Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Julie and Julia (2009), Greenberg (2010), Affleck’s Argo (2012)) but I’d not seen him in anything since Manglehorn (2014). His return is welcome – and so is his role, which has more verbal guts than those earlier ones. Matthew Maher is thoroughly, effortlessly geeky as Peter Moore, and Chris Tucker enjoyable as another Nike executive, Howard Wright, who’s the fastest talker of them all. George Raveling is in only one scene but Marlon Wayans makes it count. (In the course of this, Raveling also tells Sonny of a remarkable past connection. He was on the podium with Martin Luther King, as a security volunteer, at the ‘March on Washington’ in August 1963. After the speech was over, Raveling asked if he might have part of the transcript as a memento: King gave him the original typewritten pages of the ‘I Have a Dream’ section.)
It seems Michael Jordan made few stipulations about the film being made about him but one was that Viola Davis should play his mother, a demand that amounts to a casting coup. Davis’s Deloris Jordan exudes an almost unnatural calm, born of awareness of her family’s powerful bargaining position and of how privileged a position that is. Deloris is a striking blend of authority and humility. She and her husband (nicely played by Julius Tennon, Davis’s real-life husband) never raise their voices because they don’t need to. Perhaps Ben Affleck showcases Davis a bit too much in Deloris’s climactic phone conversation with Sonny, when she accepts Nike’s offer on condition that Michael receives a percentage of every Air Jordan shoe sold. But Davis’s strong presence and precise delivery serve to convey how game-changing this deal proved to be in the world of sports commerce. The brief appearance in Air of another internationally admired actress is less felicitous. As Käthe Dassler, widow of Adidas’s founder and mother of its current boss, Barbara Sukowa wears improbably large spectacles and speaks in a weird voice. Confronting her in the Adidas boardroom, even the imperturbable Jordan parents exchange a discreetly suspicious look that seems to say: isn’t that the Dustin Hoffman drag character in Tootsie? It’s no wonder they chose Nike instead.
Michael Jordan, played by Damien Delano Young, is always photographed at angles that keep his face hidden – we see the face only in news film and video clips, and on magazine covers, of the man himself. Michael speaks one word in the course of Air, when his voice is on the other end of a phone line: we hear his ‘Hello’ as his mother puts him on to Sonny, negotiations successfully concluded. The more Young’s back and torso are shown, the more contrived the obscuring of his face tends to become – but at least this film is concealing the identity of an authentic American hero rather than that of a Trump or Weinstein (as happened in last year’s She Said, for example). At one point in his inspired pitch to the Jordans, Sonny prophesies that Michael will be defined in the public mind through missteps and traumas, as well as by sporting success, Affleck cuts away to future evidence of the prediction’s accuracy – newspaper headlines about Jordan’s stormy private life, the murder of his father and so on. It’s a somewhat cheesy device but helpfully informative for a Michael Jordan ignoramus like me. The line ‘A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it’ crops up repeatedly in Alex Convey’s script but not ad nauseam.
I went to a lunchtime screening a couple of days before the end of Air‘s three-week run at Curzon Wimbledon and enjoyed a private screening – literally no one else in the theatre. (On the rare occasions this happens, I get nervous they’ll call the show off. Once I’m reassured on that, thoughts start up about the world going on without me in it: would the film still have been played to an audience of none?) Still, Air seems to be faring well enough at the international box office: according to Wikipedia, it has recouped its production budget (the lower end at least: this is shown as $70-$90m) less than a month after its North American opening. Most reviews have been favourable, too. The dissenters tend to be primarily uneasy that the film comes over as a paean to capitalism – an understandable reaction which some of the director’s choices encourage. Ben Affleck punctuates the narrative with selections from Nike’s list of governing principles – ‘Your job isn’t done until the job is done’, ‘It won’t be pretty’, ‘If we do the right things we’ll make money damn near automatic’, and so on – and appears to do so without irony. In a surfeit of text on screen at the end – this also explains what each of the main characters did next, that in 2003 Nike bought up Converse, etc – the various megabucks figures that flash up are accompanied by the same generic uplifting music. The whopping first-year sales of Air Jordan shoes thus seem to be accorded the same humanitarian value as the Jordan family’s philanthropic initiatives in the decades since.
This obeisance to dollar power didn’t bother me as much as I’d have expected (or as much as part of me thinks it should have). Recent months of cinema-going had left me even hungrier than I’d realised for a Hollywood movie with strong, well-written characters and a compact (112 minutes), compelling story – so I found Air refreshing. If much of the closing text is questionable, the closing sequences certainly aren’t. Early on, Sonny buys stuff at a 7-Eleven store and gets chatting about basketball with a cash desk clerk (Asanté Deshon), who suggests that Michael Jordan may be overrated. Back in the 7-Eleven at the other end of the narrative, Sonny hears from the same clerk that he always knew how great Jordan was going to be (‘Everybody knew …’, Sonny says wryly to himself as he leaves the store). We then see the notoriously unfit Sonny on a running track, about to change his ways. He runs just a few steps before thinking better of it. Mainstream American films in 2022 were so generally poor that it’s unavoidably damning with faint praise to say that the first one of 2023 that I’ve seen is better than any from last year. But Air is good cinema.
25 April 2023
