Ben Affleck’s ‘Air’ Is a Crowd-Pleaser (Especially If the Crowd Is Full of Capitalists)

Vaccaro was ultimately backed by, after considerable debate, his supervisor Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), co-worker Howard White (Chris Tucker), and Nike CEO Phil Knight (Affleck). As Knight, whose Buddhist affectations are undercut by his purple Porsche, Affleck effectively memes himself, running around in a curly wig, sometimes in douchey Oakleys and a track suit. Affleck is someone who understands the power of his own image. One shot finds his Knight barefoot in his office with his feet up on his desk—a knock-off Tarantino setup that Affleck takes a step further than Tarantino ever did by exploiting himself.

Convincing Jordan to sign with Nike while he was being courted by then-more successful brands Adidas and Converse was no easy feat. Jordan wanted nothing to do with Nike, and then there was the extra layer of resistance that was his business-handling mother, Deloris Jordan (played here by Viola Davis, my woman king). Damon’s Vaccaro chips away at her resistance to even meeting with Nike by pestering: “I don’t take no for an answer, and I think your son should be endorsed by someone of that mindset,” he explains. He has a point. In a particularly stern, often terse showing, Davis is as watchable as ever, as is just about everyone involved.

Air is just primo content, from the predictable yet crowd-pleasing arc to the fashionable, Sorkin-esque rat-a-tat of sarcastic dialogue (Chris Messina as Jordan’s agent: “When you go around me, you make me look ineffectual. And if you end up signing him, it makes me look irrelevant. Now, that’s the worst thing you can do to an agent”; Vaccaro: “Look, if your irrelevance is becoming self-evident to your client, I don’t see how that’s my fault.”). The soundtrack is full of obvious ‘80s selections (Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message,” Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”) and some less obvious ones (Chaka Khan and Rufus’ “Ain’t Nobody”). This is meat-and-potatoes cinema, but the cut is of the highest quality and the potatoes are fried to perfection.

Affleck’s most daring choice as a filmmaker is to refrain from portraying Jordan at all. We see him only from the back and in close-ups so extreme and out of focus, he’s incognito. He remains silent during meetings. To CBS Sunday Morning, Affleck explained this decision: “This is a movie about an icon, about somebody who’s so meaningful that the minute I show you somebody and tell you, ‘Hey, that’s Michael Jordan,’ you’re just going to know it isn’t.” That’s probably true, though he risked the conscious obscuring being just as distracting. But it isn’t, and a big part of that has to do with this movie being more about Michael Jordan the idea than it is Michael Jordan the person. This player’s deal with Nike opened the door for athletes to receive percentages of grosses from the merchandise that bore their name. It’s played in the movie like the utmost triumph, due in no small part to the iron-willed Deloris’ insistence.

Of course, what it means practically is that it paved the way for the rich to get richer—in a on-screen postscript before the credits, we read that Jordan makes some $400 million annually in passive income as a result of his Air Jordans deal. This is the ultimate display of morality in a movie brought to you by Amazon Studios. Yay?