Jason Bailey
Air comes to us in the midst of yet another Ben Affleck comeback cycle (how many does that make? I’ve lost count). This one marks his return to the director’s chair, from which he ascended to helm the 2012 Best Picture winner Argo, only to come crashing back down to earth four years later with the barely seen, poorly reviewed Live By Night. (Hot take: it’s not half bad.) Now, back in the public’s good graces thanks to Bennifer 2.0 and his well-received performances in The Last Duel and The Tender Bar, he directs his first film in seven years, and plays it safe – perhaps too much so.
It’s set in 1984, as established by the opening, scene-setting montage (if not so much by the accompanying music cue, Dire Straights’ “Money for Nothing,” which was released in 1985). It was a moment of comparatively low cultural impact for pro basketball – even finals games were occasionally aired on tape delay – and Nike only had 17% of the sneaker market share, trailing far behind Adidas and Converse. “Nike is a jogging company,” explains Howard White (Chris Tucker), a senior exec. “Black people don’t jog.”
Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) wants to change that. He’s a basketball scout for Nike, which means he lives out of a suitcase, attending high school and college basketball tournaments and keeping an eye on key players who might make for good endorsement deals, and then recommending those players when they’re swooped up by the NBA. (Alex Convery’s script is clearly, deeply indebted to Moneyball, and never more so than in the brainstorming meetings between Vaccaro and the marketing team, who dismiss promising players and elevate nobodies on the thinnest of premises.) Vaccaro has one question, as they attempt to pick the three or so players they’ll spread their meager budget between after the 1984 draft: “What about Jordan?”
These scenes – of Vaccaro setting his sights on first-round, third-picked Michael Jordan, figuring out why he’s got such a good feeling about this kid, and trying (often unsuccessfully) to articulate that to the skeptics surrounding him – are aces, digging meticulously into what made Jordan so special, early on. He famously sank a championship-winning shot near the buzzer in his freshman year, and Vaccaro fixates on that footage, running it back and forth, over and over; he shows it to marketing head Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), who shrugs, “Everyone’s seen this.” But Vaccaro is insistent – “We’ve been looking at him wrong” – noting that it’s not that Jordan hit the shot, but that he threw it away, with such ease, the considerable pressure of the moment barely impacting him at all. By the time he says, “I’m willing to put my career on the line for Michael Jordan,” you understand why.
Yet since he convinces Strasser and White and CEO Phil Knight (Affleck himself) that he’s right, or at least that his cockamamie plan is worth exploring, the picture’s limited suspense has come to an end; anyone interested in the subject enough to see a movie like Air knows that Michael Jordan does, in fact, sign with Nike. But there are nevertheless memorable moments along the way. He travels to North Carolina to meet with Jordan’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis) – dangerously going around super-agent David Falk (Chris Messina) – and there’s a warmth and affability in the modest scene, between both the characters and the actors. They each have a role to play, but they’re still talking to, and listening to, each other.
Bateman delivers a terrific little speech about the risks inherent in their enterprise, and it really sneaks up on you; this delicately-written confession includes a pivot that requires a mile-wide turn, and damned if he doesn’t pull it off. (This is an ideal role for Bateman, one which both utilizes his well-practiced, arid-dry cynicism, and requires him to transcend it.) As Knight, Affleck builds a character with just the right mixture of savvy businessman and New Age drip, and it certainly helps that most of his scenes are with his longtime pal Damon (the first time Affleck’s directed him, surprisingly). Their prickly conversations crackle with a sense of subtextual friction and respect, and the emotional truths they find in their last scene together feel as much inspired by what’s off the page as on it.
But the best single scene is Damon’s big sales speech to the Jordan family, his closing argument, a marvel of hyperbolic writing and honest delivery. Between them both, it gets at something real and true about sports, iconography, and humanity – about why we hold athletes in the regard we do (and why that’s a little bit dangerous). Damon also slows the pace of the movie in that beat, which is wise; the dialogue elsewhere is so smart and so funny that we just sort of float along on it, as the characters throw around lingo and trivia and f-bombs. (Messina is particularly good with the latter.)
The only major problem is the K-TEL “Super Sounds of the ‘80s” quality of the soundtrack, which blasts like an early ‘80s jukebox with irritating frequency; by the midpoint, I wanted to pull Affleck aside and gently assure him that we’re not going to forget it’s 1984 if there’s more than three minutes without an obvious needle drop. By the time Vaccaro is waiting impatiently by the phone for his call from the Jordan family as Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” fills the speakers, we’re veering into Zemeckis territory.
Nevertheless, it’s a great-looking picture (the cinematographer is the great Robert Richardson, who’s shot multiple films for Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone), and Affleck invests it with genuine passion. This is clearly a subject he feels close to and cares about. It’s just that it could use a little more juice and a little more grime; the Vaccaro character, for example, is initially seen as a bit of a pain in the ass, stubborn and unreliable and apparently harboring a gambling problem (when he travels, Knight notes, he seems to always make sure he lays over in Vegas), but those complexities mostly evaporate as we come to see how right he is. With the particulars of the story so well known, a bit more friction would be welcome.
It does arrive, though, and better late than never. Air gets reaaaalllly interesting in its home stretch, with a phone call between Vaccaro and Deloris Jordan that is willing to grapple, explicitly, with issues that the smoothly played earlier scenes barely hinted at – and that haunt professional sports to this very day. That scene provides a glimpse of the even better movie this could’ve been, if Affleck hadn’t spent quite so much time lingering on Rubik’s Cubes and playing “Sister Christian.”
B
“Air” is in theaters today.
