The Launchpad of AIR
The trials and tribulations of making a shoe for a guy.
I love getting to see a movie in the theater before it “goes wide”, like I did last night at my favorite local theater who screened Ben Affleck’s AIR. It almost makes me feel like a film critic when I can write about it and have it readable to someone before they’ve ever even had a chance to see it. You can see it in most theaters starting tomorrow, April 7th.
AIR is the culmination of two project ideas rising from the doldrums of the pandemic lockdown: a screenplay, written by then-28-year-old Alex Convery, who got the idea for the movie from a “three-minute clip in episode 5” of 2020’s Chicago Bulls documentary series The Last Dance; and Artists Equity, a new film production company founded by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
Artists Equity is interested in reshaping the allocation of resources and profits towards creators and crews, which is also a central decision-point for the characters in AIR. The details of Michael Jordan’s shoe deal wasn’t just an ordinary chunk of money given to wear certain shoes when he played basketball, it was a search for something bigger, from the Jordan family themselves as well as the creatives from Nike. It’s a strangely perfect movie for Artists Equity to launch it’s brand with: a snappy, pop-filled dramedy that is already a re-watchable cable classic alongside Moneyball, The Big Short, and other star-studded, based-on-true-events movies about process and being good at your job. It has modern ideas and philosophies, a modern imagining of the 1980’s, and puts great importance on the details of dealmaking and the idea of taking care of a client you believe in. Sounds like a production company you’d want to be involved in.
The movie follows Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a sports marketing executive for the small and floundering basketball division of Nike, a gambler and obvious non-runner who finds a reason to stake his career on an 18-year-old kid from North Carolina. He must pitch and massage his way around Phil Knight (Ben Affleck), Nike’s co-founder, chairman, and CEO, who is focused on cost-efficiency and breathing exercises. Sonny must also work with and around Nike VP Howard White (Chris Tucker) and division boss Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), and finally, he must find a way to get in touch with, Michael’s parents, namely his mother Deloris (Viola Davis), and convince them to sign with their distant third choice.
The plot, and its presentation through editing and soundtrack, plays like a sports movie, in that the known win at the end of the story isn’t the real reward, but rather the friends we make along the way. We dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge our way through competing brands, board member opinions, athlete’s agents, time-crunches, and NBA shoe-design rules to find immortality in the shape of a shoe. Damon, as well as Affleck, Bateman, and Davis, are very recognizable as themselves in their performances: Damon is a witty and charming underdog; Affleck is the odd and alluring, successful (read: billionaire), and vain friend; Bateman the witty and charming underdog boss; and Davis the moving, powerful force that some of the most successful companies on earth are trying to woo and win over. Their presences and performances lend themselves to the known-quantity shape of the story, which is a good thing here. That is what makes movies rewatchable. With a story and cast like this, it’s hard to dip below a warmly entertaining experience.
Beyond the general good times of AIR, it does occasionally reach to be something more: something moving, something meaningful. In one particular scene, Sonny Vaccaro goes rogue and waxes poetic to Michael Jordan on why he should join Nike and be their only guy, rather than just another one of the guys at the other apparel companies. The scene is scored with recycled, hyper-cinematic music, and intercut with footage from Michael’s playing days, and it just didn’t work for me. I saw it coming, I knew what it was after, and it didn’t feel organic or even expertly directed and edited.
When this movie leans into comedy and into the characters sitting in rooms talking about life, that’s where the sparks fly, and Affleck’s direction shines, the editing and soundtrack most effective. Chris Messina, who plays Michael’s agent David Falk, is a wonderful buoy of a performance, reeking of tropes and obnoxious arrogance, and he brings a lot of energy to the role and the movie. Chris Tucker is also a stand-out performer, as he is affecting a performance of a real person from a real place; he’s not “unrecognizable in the role”, but he puts in work, and lends some dramatic weight to the otherwise airy production. But when the movie dips into one of its several moments of quoting Wikipedia pages, in sequences of “bet you didn’t know this about Nike”, the magic disappears.
The screenplay and direction are, in total, a mixed bag; but the cast and production design were enough to sell me on the idea of the thing, and were enough to leave me smiling throughout.
AIR is technically something new, and yet it feels old is the best way. There are a lot of cool movies coming out soon, and AIR is the sort-of pace car. I look forward to watching older entries from directors of all these new exciting things (like I did with Ben Affleck’s Argo, a perfecly “fine” movie that also happened to win Best Picture), which is a great source of finding something new in something old. I bet one or two feature peices will come of that exercise in the next couple of weeks.
Are you going to see AIR? Are you skipping it to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie? Or are you coming over tomorrow to watch 1993’s Super Mario Bros. (text me)? As always, I’d love to hear what your watching, sewing, painting, sculpting, planting, or (insert act of creativity here).
TTFN
B