★★½

Let me start with this.  Good Will Hunting is an Oscar satire.

It’s a fine – if incomplete – movie in its own right, but when you look at it from a distance, two things stand out.  The first is that Matt Damon had mired himself in way too many Zinn-ified revisionisms and pre-Revolutionary American history books, and needed an outlet to channel his ramblings as snarkily as possible.  The second is that both the screenplay and the general presentation of the film – the finished version at least – follow the Oscar winner’s checklist to the point that it is intuitively laughable.

A special yet impaired individual in a difficult environment has a unique gift or ability but also a psychological problem that gets him in his own way.  He goes through his life struggling to form meaningful connections with others while attempting to exercise his abilities and put them to good use, and finally meets a counselor of sorts who threatens to understand him better than he understands himself.  His emotional journey and opportunities turn fraught when his demons return, until someone he trusts finally slaps some sense into him in such a way that clarifies everything that his counselor was getting at.  And in the end he takes an unthinkable yet satisfying step with the promise that the rest of his life will work out because of it.  Both the gift and disability are framed in such a way that the actor can express both without looking deformed or unfit for the screen, enabling camera close-ups and soft music.  And the entire experience affords multiple opportunities either to comment on contemporary culture and politics or to relive a past glory.  Also there is at least one British person in it.

But young Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were far too savvy to think that they could get the Oscars they actually got for a movie like that.  It’s too “funny,” and funny in its youthfulness, angry ‘90s kid vibes, and anti-boomer insecurities.  It only makes sense if you assume that their tongues were in their cheeks the entire time, which in fact they were.  If you doubt that, go to the Wikipedia page for the film and type “oral sex” in the search bar.

So when Damon and Affleck creatively reunited for Air, I might have been the only one who was less than totally thrilled.  As funny as they both are, 25 years later, both of them are now as old as the generation they were making fun of in Good Will Hunting, and they’re certainly too old for satire – or at least that kind of satire.  They’re playing men roughly their own age in an era they remember as kids.  That means the film they were making was going to be earnest, maybe even painfully earnest like Argo.  And for the first hour, that’s exactly what we get.  But it works.  It’s a rare moment where “Money for Nothing” in the opener is used as an actual marker for time rather than as its own satirical commentary on materialism.

That first hour is marvelous, and Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro drives it.  It’s a near-perfect procedural drama in how it establishes its characters, draws up the mission, and lays out the stakes.  And it excels further with the infusion of Vaccaro’s unique understanding of sports psychology, particularly where he breaks down the 1982 NCAA finals and clues himself and his partner into the earliest available sign that Michael Jordan was special.  That is the best scene in the film, followed by Vaccaro’s first meeting with the Jordans in Wilmington, NC.  Vaccaro’s conviction propels his relentlessness, and his all-American can-do optimism perfectly symbolizes both the era itself and its president.  Whether Damon and Affleck realized it or not, the first hour of Air is the most patriotic and conservative cinematic statement either of them have made in their entire careers, more energetic than anything they’ve done together since their days of working with Kevin Smith.

And then the movie gets away from them.

There is simply no substitute for Michael Jordan.  That statement rings true both to real life and to this film.  In Air, Jordan is a silhouette figure with the role of a “Present” vote in Congress.  His opinions and positions, even his personal feelings and desires, are spoken for him.  I learned more about Jordan from his own amateur performance in Space Jam than I did from this film because at least in that film I could see his face.  There’s only so much truth a man’s face can hide, and Air conceals the truth in part by hiding his face entirely.

Even if that can be overlooked, two other problems bring the moment down.  Both of them come in the “climax” scene where Sonny Vaccaro makes the ultimate pitch to Michael himself and his parents.  The only value that speech has to anything is to Joseph Vincent’s YouTube Account.  It’s exactly the sort of fan-made tribute Vincent perfected – suitable for your phone or home computer and unfit as art on the big screen.

That montage over the speech is not only unnecessary, but trivializing.  It ends up sounding like the Green Goblin’s Randian screed in Spider-Man (“the one thing people love more than a hero is to see a hero fail, fall; die trying.”)  And the footage shown is both disgraceful and exploitative.  And it’s inaccurate.  The story of Michael Jordan’s first six years in the NBA is a tale of frustration and fury from getting mauled by Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, and Dennis Rodman until he finally climbed to the top and cemented his greatness into legend with a championship sweep against Showtime after Game 1.

But the grossest part of that intercut montage is when Vaccaro says: “a lot of people can climb a mountain, but it’s the way down that breaks them,” while cutting the speech with newspaper clippings of the murder of Michael Jordan’s father and with footage of the funeral.  As though Jordan disappointed his father to death.  James Jordan was carjacked and murdered a week before his birthday while sleeping in the car Michael had bought him – a car that was recognized by the killers who shot James and then dumped his body in a swamp.  It took three weeks to find his body, which could only be identified because of his teeth and had so badly decomposed that the rest of him was cremated before he was even identified. It is tragic on multiple levels – not the least of which comes from the fact that just after Michael was born in 1962, the Jordans moved from the high-crime neighborhoods of Brooklyn down to Wilmington, North Carolina; a migration from the “enlightened” north to the Jim Crow South. In other words, James Jordan met a fate he’d worked tirelessly in his life to escape.  And this is supposed to be a commentary on how Michael himself was going to face adversity as a star athlete?  The framing is so grotesque, it looks like James’s future murder is a promised outcome of Michael’s NBA career.

There is also the racial issue.

Howard White is not in Air.  Not really, anyway.  His inclusion is so obligatory and paper thin, you can tell it was written and shoehorned in after the entire story had been finished.  What is his role, except as a black guy we see no more than twice in the film before he enters the meeting room with the Jordans and instantly bonds with them because of their race?  What’s his role in the company?  The first time you even get a clue about it is in the climax.  Before that, he’s just there to note the fact that Nike’s basketball division is a failure.  Then you barely see him again until all the way to the end.

When Jordan himself was consulted on the film, he agreed to it on two conditions: (1) that his mother would be played by Viola Davis; and (2) that Howard White be in the film.  Chris Tucker confirmed that the part for Howard White was even smaller than it ended up being in the released film.  The token appearance of Tucker’s White is an insult to Jordan and the real Howard White, who is more instrumental than anyone else at Nike for it and Jordan’s enduring bonds.  White is second only to Vaccaro as the driving force for the company’s partnership with Jordan.  But that’s not the version of events Air would have you believe to the extent that it purports to be authentic.  On top of that, Chris Tucker is given so little time to portray White that it’s impossible to take him seriously because he’s Chris Tucker.  He’s a perfect choice to play the character if he was actually a main rather than a cameo.  But White is in no more than two scenes before that meeting.  The Jordans enter the conference room, White follows them in shortly after, and suddenly it’s like an estranged family member reappeared. Then it’s over.

The way you can tell how superficial that scene is is the fact that after White is introduced, he sits down and not another word is spoken between them.  All this big rah-rah “if you sign with Nike, you’ll be working closely with me” stuff just falls by the wayside because for some reason it’s Sonny who has “earned” the right to make the Nike pitch to Michael Jordan directly, and to do that, so Air posits, is to walk in the footsteps of Dr. King.

So we have an ostensible climax where a barely visible black executive makes an elaborate entrance and a superficial connection with the marks, and then sits down and shuts up while the big MLK speech is given by Michael Jordan’s white savior.  Go back to Wikipedia and look for White’s inclusion in the plot synopsis.  It isn’t there, because Howard White isn’t in the film.  And not only should he have been given a real role and character; he should have made the pitch.  Because he did.

If you’re making a film about Michael Jordan that cannot feature Michael Jordan, and Michael Jordan himself tells you that your film is missing a character of crucial importance, anything short of rewriting the entire story to fix that problem will not do him justice.  As a result, Air deflates in its second hour to a series of predictable events culminating in both that misfire of a climax and then an absolutely pathetic “all is lost” moment when Vaccaro learns that Adidas has matched the offer and thrown in the Mercedes.  It’s a shame because the first hour remains a masterclass in setting up and coherently illustrating a procedural drama that promises to unite the greatness of Michael Jordan with the culture that his greatness created.  To fail to see it through in the remaining hour of the film comes as a disappointment, but it is also nothing new.  It simply confirms that as funny as Damon and Affleck are, the only kind of movie they know how to make together in their middle age is a farce.

A white savior rather than White as a savior; if Damon and Affleck made Good Will Hunting today, Will might have ended up in the NSA.

– Vivek