Air

This movie was a fascinating lesson in the degree to which a seemingly uninteresting topic can be made interesting by the creative effort and prowess put into making the thing. As a premise, watching a bunch of high powered executives fret about whether they can turn their billion dollar business into a multi-billion dollar one doesn’t seem like the kind of high stakes, thrilling action that would grab audiences. After all, Margin Call is a prime example of how a story that is just a bunch of rich financial executives fretting about how their firm might make less money for a quarter or two can easily end up a boring mess.

Good news is, Air is not a boring mess. What the film does, that is absolutely critical to making it work, is that it sets certain stakes that really matter to the central characters and, by proxy, to the audience. Nike was a fairly successful athletic shoe company in the 1980s, even as its basketball division struggled as an “also ran” in its category. However, it is this department, and especially the employees within it, that the movie focuses on so our thoughts of the larger successful Nike brand are replaced with the “boots on the ground” reality of that set of employees, fighting for their jobs after years of, at best, only breaking even.

This challenge is presented in an extremely easy to understand yet highly impactful way. If the basketball division can’t get their act together, the vast majority of them will be fired as the Nike board is considering shutting down the historically underperforming shoe line. This makes every main character have an almost existential need for the events of the film to go well. They are all shown to the audience as reasonably likable guys so, as empathetic fellow humans, this makes us root for them to find that success. Stakes established. How do they find that success? They have to nail the perfect sponsorship/endorsement relationships with the perfect player(s). This establishes the narrative engine. The twist? Matt Damon’s character makes the gamble to bet it all on landing the seemingly unattainable Michael Jordan (national collegiate champion, 3rd pick in the NBA draft) alone, instead of their typical strategy of signing three other talented players with perhaps less future superstar potential. This neat little causal cascade takes what could have been a weirdly out-of-touch corporate biopic into something that is actually quite engaging to watch.

The script can play a little like “hindsight is 20/20,” which sometimes works for it and sometimes against it. Knowing the bet to get Michael Jordan is a sound one, because the audience likely knows he goes on to international superstardom, robs the film of some of its tension (is this gamble even a good one?) and replaces it with curiosity (how did they get him when the odds were stacked against them?). This is usually OK, as there is plenty there in the courting of Jordan’s parents and the attempts to outmaneuver Converse and Adidas, but there are a few moments where the film asks the question if all this was really the right move, forgetting that the audience already knows it was. Similarly, there are a few speeches, especially the one near the end that supposedly convinces the Jordan camp to take Nike’s bid seriously, that is so obviously written from a place of future knowledge that it can take you out of the movie a bit if you are sensitive to that kind of thing.

While I liked the film, maybe even more than I expected to, there are some technical foibles and nitpicks to go along with the writing one’s I just mentioned. For example, the soundtrack is almost entirely made of selections of 1980s pop music. These needle drops are not well done. They rarely feel organic. Their contents, by lyric or vibe, rarely, if ever, match the scene they are in or, more commonly, precede during serviceable but fairly uninspired establishing shots and/or B-roll. This makes them stick out like a sore thumb. Yes, they help establish the temporal setting of the film, with 80s music for an 80s story, but that’s about the end of it. By the conclusion of the film, this thoughtlessness with the music selection and placement can even get a little grating.

Another nitpick, and an extremely surprising one, is that there are occasionally scenes that suffer from focus breathing, a quirk most associated with autofocus systems where they can oscillate between under and over shooting the mark on focus while the autofocus algorithm “hunts” for the right focal point for a shot’s subject. Normally, with a traditional Hollywood production, this is totally avoided with prime lenses and ubiquitous manual focus. Its presence here suggests all manner of potential explanations about gear usage, cost cutting, and more, but outside of the curiosity of the filmic gearhead what really matters is that it is subtly off putting to the viewer on the rare instances where it shows up. I noticed it most in low light scenes, possibly because the low light made it harder for the autofocus to find its mark or possibly because the cinematography in those scenes inadvertently made the effect more pronounced.

Air isn’t likely to win any awards. Nor, as one of the first serious collaborations between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in decades, with Affleck directing no less, does it necessarily live up to their all-time classic Good Will Hunting. However, it offers an extremely well conceived and well constructed part biopic, part corporate drama that, despite some minor foibles in the writing and some odd technical choices in the production and post-production, is extremely watchable despite its boardroom-centric premise.

Would Recommend: If you love your pair of vintage Jordans.

Would Not Recommend: If you can’t imagine enjoying a two hour movie about shoes.