Putting on airs

I generally like biopics. I also like most of what Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have done in their careers. So when I heard that Air was being produced by their company (Artists Equity) with Damon in the lead and Affleck supporting and directing, I expected something that was fairly high quality. And, in a lot of ways, it was. It's well-written and well-acted and funny and fairly drowns itself in 80s references contemporary to its 1984 setting, much of which I still vividly remember. But... (and there's often a "but") the downside is that it's basically a hagiography of a major corporation, not a biopic. In this story, Nike is the valiant "little guy", oppressed by the economic power of behemoths Converse and Adidas. Of course, no one with any common sense believes that that's the case and Affleck as Phil Knight and Damon as Sonny Vaccaro even mention at some point that Nike is a billion-dollar corporation. Excuse me for a moment while I search for the Davidian analogy in this supposed shepherd v giant warrior tale about the basketball shoe market because it's pretty hard to find (incidentally, the biblical David was a royal armor-bearer and one of the favorites of the king, too.) So, you're saying a billion-dollar corporation is outmuscled in one aspect of the shoe market by a couple of multi-billion dollar competitors, all the while utterly dominating an even larger facet (running shoes) of the American market? My heart bleeds. And that's the essential façade that all of the clever writing and solid acting and funny moments really can't get away from.

The basic ethical premise that the film tries to push forward is that the players were getting cheated out of value by the major shoe companies, as they were essentially free marketing for said companies by playing in the NBA, and the deal that Michael Jordan struck with Nike (that he gets a percentage of every shoe with his name/image on it) was groundbreaking and turned into a bonanza for the players. When it comes to labor being delivered the value that it creates, your friendly neighborhood Marxist is all about it, even when said labor is an elite subset of individuals on the planet. They're doing a job. Their names and likenesses are being used to push a product. They deserve a piece. The situation that the film presents in 1984 is no different than what the NCAA is trying to hide from and has hidden from since the 1950s. But the film presents all of this in the context of that "little guy" triumphing over unassailable odds with just gumption and hard work, when the truth was that Nike, given its profitability, had massive resources at its disposal. If they wanted to do a triumph of the little guy story that involved Nike, they could've done one about Phil Knight building the company by selling shoes at track meets out of the trunk of his car (which is, of course, mentioned in the film because, you know, "little guy.") If they wanted to do a story about the determination and vision and principles of Sonny Vaccaro, they could've done an actual biopic about the latter's work as a scout who created the first national high school all-star game or the creation of the ABCD camp, also to showcase high school players, or his personal drive to expose the hypocrisy of the NCAA which he's been talking about for the last 40 years. You want a story of triumphing over long odds? That sounds like a much more suitable premise.

Despite its structural failings, the film isn't actively bad. As noted, it's well-written and quite funny and Damon makes the most of the material he's given. Similarly, Jason Bateman does well as marketing exec, Rob Strasser. He's also, unfortunately, given the softball of muttering about just how important it is that he hold on to his job as one of the top executives in the billion-dollar corporation so that he can continue to bring his daughter shoes on his weekend visits. It's a sappy moment that doesn't really bring much to the overall proceedings. Speaking of which, Affleck's depiction of Knight, while decent, also doesn't bring much to the stage, as his role is to basically be Damon's constant foil, only gesturing over his shoulder at the oft-mentioned "board" and how they won't be interested in throwing away money on this basketball thing. The subtle racism of decrying the sport played by mostly Black men by the company that produces shoes for mostly suburban White people is a constant. And Viola Davis is her usual competent self as Jordan's mother, Deloris, whose steely determination to not have her son taken advantage of by these massive corporations is also everpresent. That depiction of background racism comes to the fore when Sonny visits good friend, George Raveling, who tells him about how he was not only present at Martin Luther King, Jr's speech at the Lincoln Memorial ("I have a dream"), but met King and was handed one of the original copies of said speech. Of course, when that's framed against Sonny's vision of Jordan and Nike's future, such that the film essentially compares the gamble of a talent scout on a shoe deal to the most famous speech of the American civil rights movement, you begin to see how self-important the producers' opinion of their own efforts happens to be.

Speaking of which, while I thought Affleck's direction for Argo was brilliant and thought he was unfairly robbed of at least a nomination for that work, I was left with a lot more questions in that respect with this film. He seemed to have a thing for close-ups, so that when Sonny and Rob, for example, were arguing over the budget or whether Sonny was doing his job properly, we would often be resting right on one of their shoulders or so close that we could map the pores in their faces while they half-shouted at each other. If Affleck was trying to show us how intense man-to-man defense can be in the lane, well, OK, but it left me feeling like he was engaged in what he thought was a novel technique to convey the tension of the moment but it really ended up being more distracting than anything else. And it was that kind of distraction that made me feel like all of them had kind of lost the forest for the trees. Yes, it's an amusing story, but signing a big shoe deal with an NBA star doesn't quite compare to the struggle to be treated as a human being. Similarly, when the "what happened later" captions appear on the screen, they continue to try too hard on behalf of Nike by pointing out that Phil Knight has given almost $2 billion to charity. Of course, he also ran a corporation that utilized child labor for a couple decades in Southeast Asia to ensure maximum profits on all of the products that it made, including Air Jordans. It took a lot of public pressure and an assertion of rights by workers in those countries to get that to change. So, yeah, economic rights were won for star basketball players, but not for Vietnamese kids. Hooray? And during this period, Nike went from a billion-dollar corporation to a multi-billion dollar corporation, eventually buying Converse, as the similarly self-satisfied caption details at the end of the film.

So, yeah, I don't know. Again, it's not a bad film. It's just kind of shallow on many, many levels. In a way, it's a perfect encapsulation of the decade that it spares no effort to hail and lionize. Would I rush out and hand more money to a giant corporation (Amazon) in order to see it? No. But if you want a few laughs, you could do a lot worse.