Nike’s Sonny (Matt Damon) confronts Michael’s savvy Mom Deloris (Viola Davis)
Air (2023)
In sports, we know who the winners are. The football centurions who steadily wear down an opposing team. The fleet-footed soccer player who sneaks in the tie-breaking kick before the time clock’s last second.
Perhaps most dramatically, in basketball, the wizard who, seconds ahead of the final buzzer, seems to fly through the air to deliver the game-winning slam dunk.
No one has been more dazzling at that than 6’ 6” Michael Jordan, who lies at the center of the story here, but appears on screen only briefly with his back to the camera.
Which turns out to be fine, because the player, the man himself, isn’t really needed to pull off this warmly satiric poke at sports gamesmanship.
Air takes on the offbeat task of chronicling basketball’s idolizers, the sport’s hangers-on.
It gives us a comic, yet surprisingly touching, look at the desperate onlookers and evaluators who struggle to size up basketball players in order to wring from them cold profit.
It’s 1984 in Beaverton, Oregon. At Nike, Inc. Sonny Vacarro (Matt Damon), the sport shoe company’s talent scout, gives frustrated co-founder and CEO Phil Knight (Ben Affleck, who also directs) a troubling report.
The current basketball luminaries who might endorse Nike products are all howling mediocrities.
Nike would do more for them than they could do for Nike. Adding to the gloom, Knight points to the company’s 17% market share, well behind rivals Adidas and Converse. Bankruptcy looms.
Sonny, at home watching tape replays of the rookie Michael Jordan – swift, charged, yet poised and smiling as his shots swish through nets like whispers – gets an idea.
Simultaneously watching a tape of tennis great Arthur Ashe endorsing a racket as if it were an extension of himself, Sonny substitutes Jordan and – blam! – sees a marketing bonanza.
What if Nike designed a shoe for Jordan? Not assembly line footwear that he’d endorse.
But a shoe that embodies him. Imagine, Sonny muses, millions of fans not just admiring Michael Jordan but wearing him.
Nike CEO Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) sees his company’s fate tied to the Jordan deal
Nike marketing execs Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) and Howard White (Chris Tucker) think Sonny’s proposal is wacked. The marketing endorsement budget is $250,000. And Sonny’s telling them he wants to give it all to Jordan? Ridiculous.
There’s also the daunting prospect that Adidas and Converse will match that figure, or so says Jordan’s shark of an agent David Falk (Chris Messina).
Sonny believes he can outmaneuver the rival shoe companies if he can speak directly to Jordan’s family. Falk screams over the phone: Don’t you dare!
Which, of course, Sonny promptly does. Traveling to North Carolina, he sits down with Jordan’s savvy mother Deloris (Viola Davis), who handles all her son’s business affairs.
After listening patiently, she demurs, informing Sonny that she’ll wait to hear the Nike company’s formal pitch. As we’ll discover, Deloris has an ace up her sleeve.
Then there’s the shoe itself. Deloris, Michael’s father James and Michael are due to arrive in Beaverton in a mere three days.
Getting the shoe designed on such short notice is miraculous; its name – Air Jordan – at first feels rather uninspiring; and the cash offer to the Jordan family seems skimpy.
After hearing all three major shoe companies’ pitches, Deloris telephones Sonny to let him know she just might go for Nike’s deal.
With, however, one condition: Michael gets not just an endorsement fee but 10% of the profits of every pair of Air Jordans sold worldwide.
Unheard of, says Sonny. My way or no way, counters Deloris.
What’s funny and appealing in Alex Convery’s rapid fire, surprisingly compassionate script is the way we quickly understand that none of the Nike cohort can boast of any impressive accomplishments. Michael Jordan lives in another universe.
It’s not just business practice but basketball itself, in the person of the transformative Jordan, that’s gotten ahead of – and may eclipse – them.
Charmingly, the flailing Nike team when faced with change comes off as more dumbstruck than crudely avaricious.
They’re all parasites, in a way, of athletes with more talent and drive than they themselves possess.
And they know it. They’re living off people they quite openly, profoundly, believe are their betters.
And that swiftly expanding gap is what’s actually scaring them, making them sweat, and what gives the movie its spring, its do-or-die comic tempo.
What’s eating at the Nike team isn’t just fear of spectacular failure. What’s worse is they’re not sure they “deserve” success. Or, even scarier, that they amount to much without it.
While money-hungry men lay their cards on the table, Deloris, with her enigmatic smile, tactically declines to do the same.
Davis tranquilly conflates loving mother, sharp businesswoman and basketball savant in a serene, unhurried performance, one of her best.
Damon, intensely likable here in one of his best performances, flawlessly captures this sense of clawing ambition that’s actually fending off panic.
Sonny isn’t just desperate to close the Jordan deal, he’s deeply afraid that if he doesn’t, he'll be washed up.
Playing a man walking on a tightrope, Damon here is sparer and more relaxed in his acting than I can remember seeing him.
We witness Sonny becoming agitated, but Damon never is. Sonny is frantic. Damon, even when Sonny melts down, cruises.
Affleck proved that he can sensitively direct well-meaning misfits in the lovely The Tender Bar (2021), where he also gave a breezy, confident performance.
But unlike the lovable losers in that movie, these Nike desperados are both sadder and more frenzied, which challenges Affleck the director to keep his actors’ work agile, that is, jumpy but never totally out of control.
Honoring the spirit of Convery’s script, he also has to keep the movie feeling, of all things, kind, which is an exceedingly odd take for a satire.
The script teases but it’s not deeply mocking. These people often bristle, stomp and yell, but they never deeply offend.
Jason Bateman steers this midcourse between tough and vulnerable with remarkable aplomb. Strasser thinks Sonny is going out on a limb that could be sawed off and bring the company, including Strasser’s job, crashing down.
Bateman sums up his dismay in a sweet speech about the time he can spend with his daughter only if Nike survives.
Strasser, in Bateman’s magnanimous performance, is poignant here without in the least pleading for sympathy. That openness, even naivete, is true of the entire script.
As testament to her versatility, watch Davis, so theatrically ferocious in a historical epic like The Woman King (2022), sit calmly across a boardroom table.
While money-hungry men lay their cards on the table, Deloris, with her enigmatic smile, tactically declines to do the same.
Back in North Carolina, watch an unblinking Deloris on the phone to Sonny as Davis’s pursed lips softly whisper Deloris’s ironclad, non-negotiable terms.
Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis) nails the profit participation deal for her gifted son
Davis tranquilly conflates loving mother, sharp businesswoman and basketball savant in a serene, unhurried performance, one of her best.
This movie is ultimately a gentle corporate comedy, not a scathing business world exposé.
Basketball lovers can relish the way Jordan’s accomplishments and family are duly honored, while the rest of us can appreciate how they’re not fawned over.
There’s nothing craven in these moviemakers’ praise. They artfully marry Jordan’s greatness to Nike’s financial triumph in marketing it, which of course is what came to pass in the real world.
But who could have imagined as all this gamesmanship was going on that nobody ever actually intended to harm anybody?
Smiles all around. I’m not sure that’s taught at Harvard Business School.