Product placement is over. It’s so lame. Why smuggle an item of merchandise into a movie, like contraband, and have people snicker at the subterfuge, when you can declare your product openly and lay it on the table? Why not make a film about the merch? That was the case with “Steve Jobs” (2015), which unfolded the creation myth of Apple; with “The Founder” (2016), which did the same for McDonald’s; with “Tetris,” now on Apple TV+; with the upcoming “BlackBerry,” which is not, alas, about the harvesting of soft fruits; and with “Joy” (2015), which gave us our first chance—pray God it not be our last—to watch Jennifer Lawrence trying her hardest to sell mops.
The latest example of a ready-branded film is “Air,” the product on this occasion being the Air Jordan. The movie is written by Alex Convery and directed by Ben Affleck, who also appears onscreen as Phil Knight, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Nike. The company, of course, was named for a Greek goddess, which may explain why Affleck is decked out with a beard and a hair style that fell out of fashion in 438 B.C. He also gets to drive a purple Porsche and to wear pink running pants, perilously loose around the crotch. Any looser and he’d risk an NC-17 rating. Whether or not Affleck is atoning for the shame of playing Batman, in the DC franchise, it’s pretty sporting of him, in his own film, to set himself up as a comprehensive jerk.
Not that this is a sports movie. It’s not even a shoe movie. It’s a heroic saga of the marketing of a shoe. The action starts in 1984, heralded on the soundtrack by Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing” (which actually came out the following year). Gloom prevails at Nike headquarters, in Beaverton, Oregon; basketball-shoe sales have been cornered by Converse and Adidas, leaving Nike with a meagre seventeen per cent. The task facing Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), who has been charged with turning things around, is to find three players who could front a new campaign. But Vaccaro doesn’t want three players. He wants one player, and that’s Michael Jordan.
The joke is that, by every measure of human grace, the hunter and the hunted are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Jordan is Jordan, whereas Vaccaro, as incarnated by Damon, is puffing, paunchy, and clad in such anonymous tones of beige and gray that he could die at his desk, on a cloudy afternoon, and nobody would notice. Yet he does have the knack of perseverance. Thus it is that, to the Krakatoan fury of Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), Vaccaro shows up uninvited at the home of Jordan’s parents, James (Julius Tennon) and Deloris (Viola Davis), in North Carolina, and pleads with them to consider Nike for their son. They graciously oblige; the interested parties convene in Beaverton; the deal is done.
Give Affleck a clear story and, as he demonstrated in “The Town” (2010) and “Argo” (2012), he will stick to the beat. (Too much ambiguity unnerves him; witness the sullen bafflement of “Gone Girl,” in 2014.) “Air” is pacy, adept, and entertainingly well drilled, and his cast, which includes Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, and Marlon Wayans, has a clubbable warmth. The scenes between Affleck and Damon, longtime friends offscreen, have a barbed geniality that finds its own rhythm; they’re most likable when they needle each other. At one remove from the club is Matthew Maher, as Peter Moore—Nike’s in-house genius, who designs the Air Jordan over a weekend. Unrushed and diffident, Moore thinks solely of the shoe, even though, as he realizes, it’s a pawn in the marketing game.
Step back from “Air,” however, and you begin to grasp how profoundly weird it is; weirder, I suspect, than Affleck knows. Observe Damon, Bateman, and Maher as they gaze upon the finished footwear, bathed in its mystical glow. They’re like shepherds in a Rembrandt Nativity, lit by the natural radiance of the Christ child. And they’re looking at a shoe. As yet, we are forbidden to see it for ourselves; the holy of holies must be guarded from our eyes. Likewise, although Michael Jordan is played by Damian Young, we never glimpse his face. He keeps his back to the camera at all times, the implication being that no mortal actor could hope to enshrine such a being. (Needless to say, there is no attempt to reconstruct Jordan’s moves on court; instead, we get vintage clips of the real thing, on TV.) You may or may not have believed in Will Smith, when he took the title role in “Ali” (2001), but at least you didn’t have to spend two and a half hours watching him from behind.
What is it with “Air,” then? “Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent arousal.” So says the French philosopher Guy Debord in “The Society of the Spectacle,” his jeremiad of 1967. It is, I admit, unlikely that every viewer of Affleck’s movie will race home and dive into neo-Marxist analyses of cultural homogenization; some folks will go out for a plate of ribs and a beer. But they might, as they digest, reflect with a frown on the dramatic centerpiece of the film—a speech delivered in the interests of justice by Deloris Jordan, over the phone, to Vaccaro. Because she is played by Viola Davis, a matchless purveyor of moral determination, you can’t help recalling the sequence, in “Doubt” (2008), when Davis went head to head with Meryl Streep over the future prospects of another young man. If anything, the sequence in “Air” is yet more intense, because Davis is filmed in the tightest of closeups. And what is Deloris demanding? That her son be given a percentage of the proceeds from every Air Jordan that is sold. Believe in him, and there will be no doubt.
This movie, in short, kneels at the altar of high capitalism. It even comes with a prophecy. In Beaverton, Vaccaro tells Michael Jordan, in person, that he will be brought low, assailed, and then raised up again, because, unlike everybody else in the room, he is immortal. (Some of those tribulations are displayed in a speedy montage of flash-forwards.) The executives and agents who surround Jordan are like priests, with no visible family or home life; Vaccaro and Falk are both seen dining alone. Only once do we catch a whiff of something troubling in “Air,” when a character mentions that many of Nike’s shoes are manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea. So, does Affleck conclude his film with a wide shot of a factory floor, and of those who toil, on paltry pay, to make basketball shoes? Like hell. Rather, he ends with the revelation that Nike sold a hundred and sixty-two million dollars’ worth of Air Jordans in the first year. Hallelujah.
The new Owen Wilson film, “Paint,” is set in the present day, but only just. Written and directed by Brit McAdams, the movie takes place in and around Burlington, Vermont, and tells the tale of Carl Nargle, who is played by Wilson with a curved pipe, an explosion of frizzy blond curls, and an aura of invincible gentleness. When a friend says that her Uber has arrived, Nargle replies, “I don’t know what that is.” He hosts a show titled “Paint” on a local public-television station; daubing away, and addressing the camera, he deftly completes his pictures live on air. Most of them—and eventually all of them—depict Mt. Mansfield, the loftiest peak in the state. There’s nothing wrong with returning obsessively to one theme; could it be that Nargle is drawn toward his mountain as Bonnard was to his wife, luminously untouched by time, in the bath?
No. Nargle is not a fraud, but his creative powers are of the tiniest. And he’s a fool. Also, as it turns out, he’s a predator. Over the years, most of the women who work at the station, such as Katherine (Michaela Watkins), Wendy (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and Beverly (Lusia Strus), have slipped into his clutches—specifically, into his van, better known as the Vantastic. All of this lends a fresh and menacing overtone to the mantra with which he signs off at the end of his show: “Thank you for going to a special place with me.” What’s peculiar about McAdams’s film is the mildness of Nargle’s comeuppance. Sure, he loses his job, his spot being taken by a younger painter named Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), but it’s not too long before he rediscovers love. So dreamily forgiving is the atmosphere of the plot, in fact, that I found it downright creepy. Maybe all the characters are stoned. That would explain a lot.
“Paint” will win few friends in the arena of public broadcasting—which, the film suggests, is staffed by the semi-competent and enjoyed primarily by smiling seniors in retirement homes and boozers slumped in bars. Yet McAdams does have an eye, and an ear, for the minutiae of melancholy and provincial politesse. Listen to two lovers breaking up on CB radio (“It’s over. Over”), or Katherine wistfully pondering a change of career: “Albany has a ton to offer,” she says. “I-90 and I-87 go right through the middle of it.” As for Nargle, he seems like a refugee from a Christopher Guest film, and I can imagine him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). Whether he merits a movie to himself is another matter. ♦
