Fresh

Air a film by Ben Affleck.  With Matt Damon, Jason Bateman, Chris Messina, Viola Davis, Matthew Maher.  Streaming on Amazon.  *****

I have often said, in reviewing some grim work of art, “It’s not the feel-good movie of the year.”  I meant that as a compliment.  We don’t want to feel good.  We want to see the truth.

Air actually is the feel-good movie of the year.  It’s hilariously funny, beautifully acted, with an amazing cast and a great script.  It’s got everything going for it.  And it delivers.

It’s one of those movies where we know how it ends but don’t care, getting there is so much fun.  In 1984, Nike was a shoe company in Oregon that specialized in running shoes (think Steve Prefontaine) but had yet to break into the basketball market.  Its owner, Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) was a high-minded, New Age spouting, dedicated runner, who more or less lived the life his shoe represented.  The company was doing well but wanted to do better, to at least compete with the big basketball companies, Converse and Adidas.

Their basketball guru, Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), is everything Knight is not.  Overweight, junk food eating, TV watching, low man on the totem pole.  Converse has Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and Larry Bird, and Vaccaro’s job is to look at the 1984 draft and find three players who are going to be stars, but not great stars, because he has a limited budget.  It’s fascinating to look back at that draft.  It included two players who later became great, but weren’t at the top of the list, Charles Barkley and John Stockton.  The second pick was Sam Bowie, who seemed to break his leg every time he stepped on the court and never had a pro career.  The fourth was Mel Turpin, who also never got off the ground.

Vaccaro was obsessed with the third pick, and decided not only to pursue him, but to bet the house on him, devote his whole budget to one guy.  Everyone opposed doing that, either because it was too risky or they thought the guy would never take it.  No one agreed.

It turned out the third guy was the greatest basketball player who ever lived.[1]

The thing that’s hard to remember is that nobody knew that at the time.  People thought Michael Jordan would be good, some thought he would be great, but no one saw what he would become.  His team had won the NCAA title his freshman year, and he had taken the deciding shot, but I didn’t see him as the best player on that team, which included James Worthy and Sam Perkins.  When Vaccaro stops by the local Seven-Eleven to pick up his dinner, the clerk there—a big fan—doesn’t think Jordan will be great.  Too short for the NBA, only averaged 17 points.  Not a big deal.

Vaccaro can’t even get a meeting with the family, because Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina) is convinced he really loves Adidas, despite the fact that he’s had to wear Converse at UNC.  So Vaccaro takes the unusual—and forbidden—step of traveling to Wilmington, NC, and meeting the family himself.  Michael’s father, James Jordan (Julius Tennon) seems vaguely charmed.  But the person Vaccaro must convince is Michael’s mother Delores, played by the great Viola Davis.

It’s interesting that the movie at that point suddenly focuses not on basketball ability, but on character.  One of the first things Delores says is that eight generations of Jordans have lived in that place, which was not especially welcoming to black people (see the Wilmington Seven trial).  What Vaccaro was seeing in Jordan was not his stupendous one on one basketball talent, which hadn’t been much in evidence in college, but something about his drive to win, and to succeed.  He wanted to speak to Delores Jordan because he knew that she, like him, knew her son had something special.  She didn’t fall head over heels for his pitch.  She wanted her son to get paid for what he had.  But to everyone else he was just a commodity.  Vaccaro—at least as he’s presented here—was seeing something else.

All this is not to mention the many things that make the movie so much fun.  As Nike’s second-in-command basketball guru, Chris Tucker is a boisterous source of never-ending patter, who knows as much about basketball as Vaccaro and knows how to talk to the Jordans.  Chris Messina is hilarious as Jordan’s angry, arrogant, full-of-himself and incredibly obscene agent, David Falk.  That is one of the great comic performances I’ve ever seen.  Matthew Maher adds depth as the designer who has spent his whole life envisioning the perfect basketball shoe, and now has just days to create it.  And Jason Bateman gives a wistful performance as Rob Strasser, Nike’s publicity man, who both encourages Vaccaro and is afraid he will flop.  It’s a high-risk game they’re playing.

There are gaffs in this as a period piece.  The IMDb website points out various songs in the soundtrack that hadn’t been recorded yet.  (The soundtrack is an eighties grab bag.  To me, a Sixties guy, it sounded incredibly stupid.)  But the one I noticed the most—as did my wife, when we talked about it the next day—is the common use of the word fuck, which was not as ubiquitous as it is today.  People used it among friends, of course.  But at the most important meeting of the movie, when the whole company is presenting itself to the Jordans, three people say this word—including Vaccaro, in the impassioned speech he makes to the young Michael Jordan (which is a great speech, but I don’t believe he ever made it)—and that would have been a huge mistake in 1984.  It would have been like farting in the middle of the speech.

My wife, as the first photographer for the North Carolina Independent, went to Jordan’s final game, and at the end (this is just like her) asked if he would pose for a photograph with his whole family.  He did that, embracing almost the whole group with his gigantic reach.

I, as a Duke fan, couldn’t stand the guy.  I was glad to see him go.  But I loved him as a pro.

[1] I should mention here that my grandson thinks I’m an idiot, and that Lebron James is the greatest player who ever lived.