Ben Affleck’s account of how Nike signed Michael Jordan is quick, funny and well played, with Matt Damon and Viola Davis at their most watchable. It is also a corporation’s story told the corporation’s way, and the man it is about never shows his face.
Ben Affleck has made a film about a shoe. In 1984 Nike’s basketball division is the runt of the company, trailing Converse and Adidas, and Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), the scout who signs its players, wants to bet the year’s whole budget on one rookie from North Carolina who has yet to play a professional game. Alex Convery’s script follows him from a beige office in Beaverton to the Jordans’ front door in Wilmington and back. It is a fast, funny, well-played 112 minutes. It is also a film about a corporation admiring its own nerve, and it asks us to admire along with it.
Damon carries it with a paunch and a bad haircut, sweating through his shirts and eating from vending machines in the car park, a man who has been right about players for years and never been paid for it. Jason Bateman plays Rob Strasser, the marketing head, tired and decent, worried about his job and about a daughter he sees at weekends. Affleck gives himself Phil Knight, the founder, who pads about barefoot, drives a purple Porsche and quotes Buddhist maxims at people who want a decision, and he plays him as a man who runs a company by seeming not to. Chris Messina’s David Falk, the agent, exists to shout obscenities down a telephone, and every one of them landed with us.
Viola Davis plays Deloris Jordan, the mother, and does it mostly by listening. In the Wilmington scenes she sits across a table from Damon while he talks, and her face tells us how much of it she believes, which is about half. The film’s best stretch is the pitch in Beaverton, when Damon abandons the slides and simply talks to the family, and we admit our throats tightened. Then we remembered what we were being stirred by, which was the market share of a sportswear company, and we felt a little foolish, and the film had already moved on to the next joke.
Robert Richardson shoots it in soft amber light, so that even the fluorescent offices look like a memory of themselves, and there is scarcely a hard shadow in the film. François Audouy dresses Nike’s basketball division in low ceilings, corkboards and cardboard boxes, so the company about to conquer the world is housed like a regional insurance firm. Charlese Antoinette Jones puts Damon in short-sleeved shirts a size too small and Affleck in a lilac tracksuit, and both tell us more than a page of dialogue would. William Goldenberg cuts the telephone calls as duels, both ends in frame, and keeps the whole thing moving at the speed of a good sales call. The soundtrack is one hit of the period after another, cued so often that by the halfway point it works like a laugh track.
Michael Jordan is played by Damian Young, and we never see his face. He is a pair of shoulders in a doorway, a figure at the far end of a table. It is a defensible choice, since the man himself is more famous than any actor could be, but it means the person the deal is about is the one person with no say in the film. Everyone who does speak became rich. The film knows this. It gives Bateman a speech about a shoe being just a shoe, and Damon a line about who ends up exploited, and then it lets them say it and goes back to the deal. A brief detour to the Dassler family at Adidas, with Gustaf Skarsgård and Barbara Sukowa around a boardroom table, is played for laughs and over in a minute.
Moneyball (2011) was about a man who was right and lost anyway, and it is a better film because of that. Air is about men who were right and won, and it knows the outcome so well that it cannot pretend the odds were long. Affleck directs it cleanly, in rooms, without a shot you would remember on the way home. He is good with his actors. He is less interested in anything they are not saying.
It carries a 15, almost entirely for Messina’s telephone manner, and it runs 112 minutes without a slack stretch. Take someone who dislikes sport; nobody plays basketball in it and they will have as good a time as you. Do not come out believing the people on screen were the underdogs.
