Air

The longer Air goes on, the further the scales are tipped from a pleasant enough period puff piece to a full-on, Nike valorising advertisement. Director Ben Affleck's film about a sort of struggling sportswear company (and even then, we are told, only really within a very specific division) betting big on an up-and-coming Michael Jordan is so consumed with depicting the particulars of a high top sneaker pitch that it forgoes any perspectives or situations where the audience feels like they're being taken into a somebody's confidence. For instance, we're given an inkling that Matt Damon's Sonny Vaccaro has a gambling problem but the fragments of chronic ill fortune we witness are simply data rationed out early as a way to then contrast with the bigger bet Vaccaro makes with his department's budget in pursuit of Jordan. That's it. 

Tacitly, we are told that Vaccaro, the man, isn't particularly interesting - it's the deal that he makes for Nike Inc that truly means something. Hobbled by this incuriosity, Air proceeds like a first act set-up for a second act that exists only in the audience's local shopping centre. This sense of arrested mechanical development is all over the film. The dramatic language of Air is trapped in its zippy groundwork laying phase, deploying dopamine hit singles from the 1980s with such careless frequency that the effect eventually grows aggravating. We never get to luxuriate in this music; not prompted to consider what the latest track might mean for the scene playing underneath it either. All selections are obvious and, largely, incidental. Air is deliberately light and superficially then, a film centred around grasping ad men that apportions negligible space to its most interesting subjects: Viola Davis, who invests a quiet dimension in a Deloris Jordan written to be an inscrutable obstacle, and Michael himself, who is treated with the same shrinking reverence afforded to Jesus Christ in Ben-Hur.