Air (2023)

Air arrives bearing the solemn weight of a true story that changed the world of sport, which is to say it dramatizes a shoe contract. Ben Affleck directs with period-piece competence, all rotary phones and 1984 needle drops, and the result is a brisk corporate comedy about a failing division of Nike persuading a young Michael Jordan to sign. We never see Jordan's face. That is a decision of some cunning, since the film is not about him but about the executives who needed him, a room of white men in Oregon slowly realizing that the future belongs to a family from North Carolina.

That family supplies the film's modest social conscience. Viola Davis plays Deloris Jordan as the negotiator who actually matters, extracting a percentage of every shoe sold and quietly reframing the transaction as a partnership. The supporting cast, Chris Tucker, Marlon Wayans, Julius Tennon, gives the back half a warmth the boardroom scenes cannot generate. There is a thread of racial awareness here, the Jordans reading a white institution more clearly than it reads itself, but the film never turns it into an argument. It is content to let the deal speak for itself.

Which is the trouble, if we are keeping score of such things. Air has been accused, fairly, of being a two-hour advertisement for Nike, and the accusation sticks because the film agrees with it. The profit motive is the hero. The corporation is the plucky underdog. There is a mild inspirational streak about knowing your worth, but no sermonizing, no climate hand-wringing, no lecturing of any kind. What we get is a handsome, well-acted, entirely sincere celebration of a sneaker, and the strangest thing is how much we enjoy it anyway. The film is a monument to capital, and it knows it, and it sleeps fine at night. So, presumably, does everyone involved.

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