Air
The “Air” has a lively feel because of the man in the middle, Sonny Vaccaro who is hustling to make his biggest deal.
We already know how this ends, don’t we? We know going in that former Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro accomplished his dream. Michael Jordan became a star, maybe the greatest basketball player ever. The Air Jordans the shoes that give this film its name became the most famous and coveted sneakers of all time.
So how do you tell a story when your audience knows the ending? That’s where Ben Affleck’s deceptive genius comes in as a director. His fifth feature behind the camera follows in the tradition of his previous movies “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town,” “Argo” (which won him an Oscar for best picture) and “Live By Night”, he makes solid, mid-budget adult films that are all too rare these days. Affleck puts an emphasis on strong writing, seasoned performers and venerable craftsmen behind the scenes. His choice of cinematographer, longtime Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino collaborator Robert Richardson, is one example of this.
With “Air,” it all adds up to an incredibly fun package one that’s old-fashioned but also vibrant and satisfyingly new. Affleck works from a sharp and snappy script by Alex Convery about how Nike landed Jordan by creating not just a shoe for him but one of him. His soon-to-be iconic persona represented in footwear form that made us all feel like we could fly so high, too. This may sound like it’s a two-hour sneaker commercial for “Air Jordans.” It is not that at all. If you love movies about process, about people who are good at their jobs, then you’ll be absorbed by all the moments spent inside offices, conference rooms and production labs here.
It’s what happens within those mundane spaces that makes “Air” such a pleasure, starting with the reunion of Affleck and Matt Damon. It’s so much fun to watch these lifelong best friends, frequent co-stars and co-writers bouncing off each other again, needling and prodding each other, more than a quarter-century after “Good Will Hunting.” Damon stars as Vaccaro, the Nike recruiting guru who saw the North Carolina kid as a once in a lifetime player and wouldn’t take no for an answer, he kept him from going to Converse or Adidas or any of those cooler brands. Affleck is Nike co-founder and former CEO Phil Knight, who’s part Zen master and part corporate shark. He pads around the office barefoot but drives a Porsche that he insists isn’t purple it’s grape. Vaccaro is his friend and fellow soldier from the company’s earliest days; he’s the only one who can give Knight some truth, and both the warmth and tension of that relationship come through.
The year is 1984 (oh boy, it sure is but more on that in a minute), and Nike’s basketball division is an afterthought within the Oregon based running shoe company. Nike itself is an also-ran among its competitors. Vaccaro knows Jordan can change all that (“Air” consists mainly of him telling everyone around him that), though character actor Matthew Maher nearly steals the movie as Nike’s idiosyncratic shoe design guru Peter Moore.
“Air” is a timeless underdog story about guts, dreams and moxie. So Vaccaro delivers a killer monologue at a key moment in hopes of closing this deal with Jordan (whom Affleck shrewdly never shows us full-on he remains an elusive idea, as he should be, but an intoxicating bit of cross cutting reveals the legacy he’ll leave over time). But Affleck very much wants to make us feel we’re in the mid-’80s. Sometimes, this comes through subtly and amusingly there’s a throwaway joke about Kurt Rambis that made me chuckle (you don’t have to know anything about basketball or this era to enjoy the film, but there are many extra pleasures if you do). More often, however, Affleck goes for nostalgia with needle drops and pop culture references practically wallpapering every scene; if this opening montage isn’t enough Cabbage Patch Kids! Hulk Hogan! The “Where’s the Beef?” ad! President Reagan! Princess Diana! he throws in a Rubik’s Cube or a stack of Trivial Pursuit cards as a transitional device. And ‘80s hits provide such wall to wall accompaniment that they become distracting from Violent Femmes and Dire Straits to Cyndi Lauper and Chaka Khan to Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” playing while Knight simply pulls into the Nike parking lot.
But that’s a minor quibble about a movie that otherwise is as smooth and steady as one of Jordan’s buzzer beating, fadeaway jumpers in the late ’90s.
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