Making a movie based off of something that actually happened is a sketchy proposition because what actually happened was probably laborious and boring and dumb and self-important and characterized almost exclusively by people you would never want to hang out with just talking and talking and talking and everybody is probably overweight and if it’s a war we’re talking about then there’s the added element of these mediocre ingredients still somehow managing to culminate in half of Europe dying. This minor snafu in the process of lifting events from reality to the screen is dealt with in a myriad of ways, but the most popular one is to simply gloss over the bad stuff, gloss the fuck over the worse stuff, and then make up everything else. How uncomfortable of a final product you produce through this process scales directly with how awful the underlying history is. So, best practice: pick an historical event that, while impactful on the arc of human history in some capacity, probably didn’t exactly change the angle of declination at which Earth rotates about its axis, and then turn the tone dial on your production to ‘breezy’ just to be sure. Air, Ben Affleck’s retelling of how Nike signed Michael Jordan to an industry-altering endorsement deal, hits this shit just about as perfectly as a movie can.

Air

The year is nineteen what-odd eighty-four and Nike is making dumb amounts of money from their running shoe division by betting hard on the belief that white people are bland and predictable, a business model that has never not worked. On the flip side is their basketball division, which sucks, sucks harder than a white person out jogging in their new Nikes, and as a result of said sucking is falling farther and farther into irrelevancy, to the point where man in charge Phil Knight is considering shutting down the whole division (is that true, or just fabricated to raise the stakes of the film? who fucking cares! such is the benefit of not choosing a large and depressing topic for your history movie!). But Sonny Vaccaro, the basketball division’s resident True Believer and Guy You Just Can’t Help But Like, Mostly Because the Screenwriter Has Been Given Strict Instructions to Allow No Alternative, both disagrees with this assessment and has a vision about how to not just save Nike basketball, but simultaneously reinvent wholesale how athletes are marketed. This vision, in particular the audaciousness of its scope, revolves around rookie Michael Jordan, whose fundamental difference from even his fellow professional athletes, the inevitability of his transcendence into something more than a basketball player, is apparent only to Vaccaro, planting an image in Vaccaro’s head with such acuity that neither our protagonist nor his dad-bod will rest until it is realized.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Nothing

I was extremely excited to see this movie for a lot of reasons, but this is probably the strangest one: I was jazzed to watch Air because a story like this one, whose outcome is already engrained in the public consciousness so thoroughly that even the path taken towards that outcome feels like something you must’ve seen before, is basically dead on arrival from a narrative standpoint. That sounds like I was looking forward to a movie simply because I wanted the mean-spirited pleasure of watching the production crash and burn, but no, dig this: this weird aspect of Air’s underlying history got me all hot and bothered to see it because if a story can’t entertain us through surprises or some kind of inherent uniqueness then it needs to swap in something to make its runtime worth sitting through. A wild visual style, egregious amounts of frontal nudity – the filmmaker doing all that filmmakin’ needs to provide something to us, the masses, to make the popcorn go down easier. And, because Ben Affleck is a good filmmaker, I figured that something would both entertaining and instructive as to how the whole movie-making thing happens.

And, brother, did I get my wish!

“OK,” you’re probably thinking, “so what should I look forward to in place of genuine narrative surprise? Is it boobs? Please tell me it’s boobs. Can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve seen me a good boob movie. You know, not a porno per-se, just a film that features an absolutely devastating pair of cans.”

No, you fucking weirdo!

It’s tone!

Air is a masterclass in motherfucking tone, specifically the way in which a tightly-crafted feel to a movie abstracts away the predictability or outright banality of individual moments and instead holds the entire production together on the strength of that underlying, indefatigable rhythm that joins those moments together. Everything in Air – from the dialogue, to the pacing, to the choice of scenes themselves – is subordinated to the auspices of how they feel in relation to one another, which paradoxically (and awesomely) makes the invisible backdrop onto which the more obvious elements of the story are arranged an element itself, one that while never explicitly seen actually exerts its hand even more assuredly than if it were visible. You’ve heard this song before, a thousand fucking times, probably, but those limbic parts of your brain just don’t care because they’re too busy nodding along to that familiar yet undefinable tattoo that rattles up primal and real through the walls in every goddamn scene.

I mean, this is a movie that features lines like (paraphrasing, here):

“I’ll never be able to justify that to the board!”

 

“You’re risking everything on this!”

“Sometimes you have to risk everything!”

 

“That’s not how the industry works.”

“Well, maybe it’s time we changed how the industry works.”

 

“You’re a loose cannon, Mad Dogg, but god dammit you get results.”

 

But all of them work, even the one I made up, because of the effortlessness with which they are presented. And the structure? The fucking structure? You think that’s any more innovative? Child, please:

Are the executives at Converse and Adidas presented as turgid, unimaginative suits, while everybody at Nike (which, remember, by this point in its history was still a nearly billion dollar company and not, like, Phil Knight pluckily selling shoes out of his car) is presented as a hip outsider?

You’re goddamn right!

Is there a scene in which the more conservative elements at Nike want to replicate the same lame pitches that rival executives threw at the Jordan family, only for our hero, realizing that none of this is From The Heart, quite literally pulls the plug on said rote presentation, goes rogue, and delivers the kind of heartfelt speech that one-hundred percent did not and could not have happened in real life because for all its supposed spontaneity in the context of the film was almost certainly the result of thirty different script doctors workshopping every syllable of the speech?

You know it!

Is there a moment where our protagonist, who, remember, is an infallible genius, Notices Something that Nobody Else Has Noticed, and uses that observation to justify risking everything?

My nipples couldn’t be harder!

But those moments work, too, because they’re bounced into and out of with such simple charm and clarity of vision that at a certain point you’re jiving to the way scenes are presented more than the content of any particular moment. I mean, at one point in the movie Phil Knight assures Sonny that it’s the journey, not the destination (another potentially meh moment) that matters in life, and that is a dead-on perfect distillation of this film’s use of tone and pacing: it’s how we keep getting to each scene in the movie, and the unobtrusive way in which those scenes just kind of happen and then politely make way for the next undemanding beat, that becomes the star of the show more so than anything that actually, like, happens in the film.

Tell Me How This is Accomplished. Tell Me Now, and Do Not Tarry.

There are some nice, practical ways in which Affleck and his team manage to accomplish this. The first has got to be editing. This movie absolutely slaps, my friend, from moment to moment with an irreverence that always comes as close as possible to undermining the inherent conflict of the story without ever actually doing so. The movie refuses to take itself seriously just enough as to encourage you to not raise expectations for any particular scene to be, like, Oscar-worthy, but is never glib enough to descend into outright stupidity or self-satire.

For example, there’s a moment in the film where teams at Nike, Converse, and Adidas are all engaged in heated planning for their courtship of Jordan: we need this scene in order to set up how the middle part of the movie is going to go, but that doesn’t make it any less dry. Enter the editing, which sympathizes with our incipient boredom and banishes that shit altogether: the three conversations play out essentially simultaneously, transitioning into one another while the camera goes full three-sixty around each team as they talk, melting three different conversations into one, which aside from speeding up the proceedings also provides a nice little visual cue as to how similar all of these suits are in their operation (before Nike Changes Everything, of course); we even get a spritz of ‘Rock the Casbah’ to grease the wheels even more, an audio choice that would be trite for an 80s-set story if it also wasn’t applied so quickly and lightly as to return to oblivion before you even have the time to realize what an obvious song choice that is.

And then there’s that sequence – that fucking sequence! – composed of nothing except clichéd parts but still absolutely delightful because of how well-edited it is! It’s like they constructed the Mona Lisa entirely out of Mr. Potato Head pieces, this sequence. Here’s the rundown:

Our protagonist is down on his luck (of course); he has a conversation with an Everyman (I personally refuse to converse with anyone except such fellows); said protagonist goes back to his place for Another Night’s Work (there’s no way he’s quivering on the edge of insight, it couldn’t be possible); in rewatching Jordan footage – in this case the most famous clip of young Jordan currently in existence circa 1984, his title-winning shot during his sophomore year at North Carolina – our protagonist Notices Something that no one else has noticed; protagonist man, now Inspired, storms down the hallways at Nike headquarters on the way to his boss’s office, prepared to Change Everything.

Nothing about this sequence, in terms of literal events, even attempts to break the mold of what you’d expect to see in a movie like this. So why is it one of the best sequences in the film?

– It never overstays its welcome, and there isn’t a second more of footage than there needs to be. It probably took you longer to read my synopsis of the sequence than it would take you to actually watch it.

– The rote components are presented so sincerely (tight framing on Vaccaro as he realizes that Jordan is going to change everything, a volume swell as the sequence approaches its emotional crescendo) that you can’t help but be charmed by them.

– Cuts so damned precise that even though you know the final shot of Vaccaro watching the Jordan footage is going to be followed by him back at the office, the moment when it happens is just so goddamn satisfying that you’re glad the movie didn’t attempt to subvert anything.

Make my grilled-cheese with enough tender, loving care and I won’t even notice that I’m not at a three-star Michelin restaurant. Shit, make that sandwich thoughtfully enough and as far as I’m concerned I am at a three-star Michelin restaurant.

Performances

This dedication to keeping it fun for the family (except for that part where Jordan’s agent screams about eating someone’s testicles, which was weird, but whatever; your kids are old enough to hear one man threaten another with a good old-fashioned scrotum-tasting) extends to the performances as well, and ‘performance’ is the correct word to use. No one (except for one person, who we will get to!) is really acting in this movie, in the sense that they are trying to disappear into the skin and psyche of another human. These people were hired for being known quantities, and they provide exactly that: Matt Damon is Likeable Dad, the role he plays in between murdering people in Bourne movies; Jason Bateman is featured playing the role of What if the Character That Jason Batman Plays in Every Movie Existed in the Year 1984, and that Is the Only Difference; Chris Tucker makes an appearance as Why the Fuck is Chris Tucker Only in One Movie Every Decade, Could the IRS Just Nail Him on Back Taxes or Something So He’ll Have No Choice but to Work More; and Ben Affleck rounds out the main Nike team as Tragically, Ben Affleck is Also in This Movie. That last one might seem kind of mean, but if I’m going to fellate Affleck the director then I’m morally obligated to whine about Affleck the actor – the dude turns in, like, anti-performances, ones wherein he tries so hard to exert any kind of screen presence that the whole thing comes across like an embarrassing screen test. He even goes so far as to drench himself in 80s paraphernalia for his role as Phil Knight, as if Affleck reasoned that that maybe if he played a character who is supposed to be a douchey clown then his performance would work simply by accident, which is actually kind of sound logic, but it somehow still doesn’t work, which is almost impressive.

But, whatever: we’re not here to make fun of Ben Affleck, the actor (we are here in large part to make fun of Ben Affleck, the actor); we are here to appreciate Ben Affleck, the director, who is good and talented and understands how to make a movie bubble with such lean efficiency that any trifling blemishes are simply sublimated beneath the overall cadence of its goodness. So we’re just going to skip on by this segment about performances without delving too deep into anything, and we’re going to do so in the spirit of lightness that Air itself applies to its material – but we are going to make one more detour into our observations on acting before we do, because, fuck, it must happen.

Viola Davis

Calling Viola Davis too good for this movie would be weird because this movie is very good, so instead I will call her role in the film as Deloris Jordan, Michael’s mom and essentially his real agent, hilariously awesome. And this is why: the intensity and raw awesomeness of Davis’s performance is so goddamn incongruous with the rest of the film – she is Acting while everybody else is Performing – that it’s like watching an adult play a pickup game against little kids, just standing there under the hoop, contemptuously swatting away their layups and not even considering giving anybody a free one, because how the fuck will they learn how rough life can be if I just give them a basket.

I want to stress that I do not think this is because Viola Davis failed to understand the tone and substance of the film she was appearing in. No, I would not insult her like that. I think the real explanation is this: Viola Davis is simply too good at acting to stoop to the level of Performance, so even though she was trying to just kind of Appear in the movie like the rest of the big names she simply doesn’t have the ability to scale down her raw talent enough. Her character marches so deliberately into her first scene alone with Damon’s Vaccaro that the two might as well be lit differently, or edited into the same frame from two different movies, and that effect both never subsides and never stops being awesome. You’ll notice that Deloris gets tighter framing than just about anyone else in the movie during her Moments, showing that Affleck himself realized that some real acting was going on and needed to film accordingly. Viola Davis basically bends the tone of this movie to fit the undilutable gravitas of her acting ability, and that is my favorite thing.

The End

Being chill and making popular entertainment is an art form as steeped in tradition and requiring just as much craft as putting out the heavy shit. To be able to tell some obvious story in such a way as to actually embrace said story’s fundamental lack of surprise, indeed to turn that supposed liability into an asset, is some clever, alchemic goodness. Too often storytellers when confronted with such a situation run in the opposite direction and embellish their narrative with Grand Things That Are Large because they feel like audiences could only possible enjoy a story if it contains catastrophic levels of import – Vaccaro being given a heroin addiction or something, or cyborgs attacking the Nike headquarters the day of the big meeting. But not every song has to be ‘Kashmir’! Sometimes we just want to nod along to a real banger and enjoy the beats. Air accomplishes this so wonderfully that I’m not even going to make a MacGruber joke, which is a three-star review in my Michelin system.