“Air” is a good time, as well as a triumph of sports marketing in every conceivable way. It’s a docudrama — really more of a docucomedy-drama, with workplace banter and zingers for fuel — about how Nike marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, played by Matt Damon, convinced his boss Phil Knight, played by co-star and director Ben Affleck, to cough up the funds to make the pitch to get the basketball star for the ages to sell their shoes. It’s a movie about winners, winning and millions.
We do not see Michael Jordan in “Air,” aside from a few shots of an essentially nonverbal actor’s back, or the back of his head. He’s the guy in the room everyone’s talking about, a wondrous, never-fully-revealed figure. Like Jesus Christ in “Ben-Hur.”
“Air” is also about spending money to make money, which would make it a period piece in much of corporate America today even if it weren’t, in fact, set 39 years ago. In sports movie terms “Air” is the opposite of director Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball.” That film, a terrific one, told of how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane scraped together a Basic Economy roster of promising nobodies through the use of sabermetric analysis. In “Air,” no metrics are allowed. This is a story of middle- and upper-management gut feelings.
