Air (2023) * * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Ben Affleck

Starring:  Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis, Chris Tucker, Chris Messina, Matthew Maher

It is a testament to director Ben Affleck's exceptional skill that he creates suspense with a story in which we know the outcome and also one in which the stakes aren't high for an average working person to care about.   In Air, we witness a tale of the rich becoming richer for both Michael Jordan and Nike.  What affects us most about Air is how we are drawn into the movie's energy and its efficient storytelling.   There is little fat here and the story whooshes along.   So what if the payoff is Nike became the top sports sneaker company on the planet and Michael Jordan has earned 400 million to date in "passive income" thanks to the deal he made which was unprecedented at the time? 

Air takes place in 1984 and the movie's definitive sense of time and place transplants us to that year.  The movie doesn't take potshots at the styles, clothes, hair, cars, or decor of the time.  There was a year 1984 and stories took place in that year.   The Los Angeles Summer Olympics of that year loom large.  The NBA draft has already taken place and Nike's sales meeting run by Rob Strasser (Bateman) is uninspired, mostly because Nike lags significantly behind rivals Converse and Adidas in terms of gobbling up top basketball names.   Rob writes off Michael Jordan as already the property of Adidas, but Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) has a brainstorm:  Bet the house and Nike's full annual budget allotment for the basketball division on Jordan, the North Carolina standout who had yet to play his first game for the Chicago Bulls.  

Nike co-founder Phil Knight (Affleck) is unsure about the risk of spending your whole budget on one unproven rookie, but Vaccaro talks Knight into allowing him to explore the possibility.  Sonny, who is determined and desperate, breaks some of the unwritten rules of signing a player, including making unannounced home visits to Jordan's family and pissing off Jordan's agent David Falk (Messina) in the process.  But Sonny has a way of connecting with Jordan's mother Deloris (Davis) and convinces her to meet with Nike after the meetings with Converse and Adidas go precisely as Sonny predicted they would. 

The bulk of Air deals with Sonny going all-in on Jordan and a sense that the future of Nike hangs in the balance, which ups the tension.   If Jordan doesn't sign, then Nike will fall back into irrelevance in the marketplace.  Air does a masterful job of making us care about its story, and this is due to the witty script by Alex Convery, the pace, the performances, and the movie's insider knowledge on the sports marketing landscape.  There is also a critical scene which paved the way for the future of sports marketing as argued by Deloris:  Why shouldn't the athletes, who make billions for schools, get a taste of the money themselves?   In the film's epilogue, we see how Sonny played a part in that development.   In those ways, Sonny Vaccaro was a trendsetter in more ways than one.  And he made a whole lot of people a whole lot of money.   Air understands that and because this is the case, Sonny's passions become ours.