Air Barbie
Matt Damon in “Air.”
Warner Bros. photo via IMDB
Ryan Gosling and Margot Robie in “Barbie.”
Matt Damon is fat and Ben Affleck is clueless.
That's most of what you need to know about “Air,” the comic flashback to the 1980s when Nike landed a sponsorship deal with young basketball phenom Michael Jordan and created a shoe for him. They named the shoe Air Jordan. It would go on to revolutionize sports, marketing, the American economy and, just for good measure, American culture itself.
The film premiered last April; now Amazon Studios is putting screeners in reviewers' hands hoping to get it into the awards-season hunt. Its cast has plenty of Oscar cred to inspire such hopes. Good buds Matt and Ben won Oscars for writing “Good Will Hunting” a quarter-century ago, before going on to create two of the most stellar careers in Hollywood.
Then there's another past Oscar winner, Viola Davis. She plays Michael Jordan's mother Deloris, who ultimately proves herself smarter than any of the supposed financial geniuses in the story. She heads a supporting cast that spreads the clever-jock wordplay among masters like Jason Bateman, Marlan Wayans, scene-stealing Chris Messina and Chris Tucker.
Damon, in a body suit and camera lens that widens his face, plays Sonny Vaccaro, a hustler in Nike's nascent basketball shoe division who turns his obsession with signing Michael Jordan into a harebrained strategy. A bearded, well-coiffed Affleck, who also directs, plays Nike founder Phil Knight. Phil's a Porsche-driving, Zen-spouting figurehead who's been in over his head since the company went public.
Nike corporate culture, along with the sights and sounds of the '80s are points of interest in Alex Convery's caffeinated screenplay that falls somewhere between “Jerry Maguire” and “The Big Short.”
But while the guys onscreen look like they had a blast making “Air,” ultimately the movie is a spectator sport, leaving the audience on the sidelines watching all the A-listers have all the fun.
Speaking of awards season, watching “Air” reminded me of last summer's blockbuster “Barbie.”
In “Air,” as opposed to “Barbie,” the bros are the good guys.
But as opposed to “Air,” “Barbie” is going to actually win a lot of those movie awards. Its music alone nabbed 11 Grammy nominations announced last week. It set box-office history when it was released, making director-co-writer Greta Gerwig the first female filmmaker to break the billion-dollar mark. Along with Taylor Swift, it heralded 2023 as a great year for girl power.
I started reviewing “Barbie” last August on the tail end of the Barbieheimer epidemic. But before I could post it to the blog, real life – in the form of the Maui wildfires – intervened. It didn't seem nearly as important to talk about “Barbie” after the disaster, especially since my daughter and her daughters were on my case, rolling their eyes about me not loving the film as much as they did.
It wasn't my fault. Understanding how a plastic doll could have an existential crisis was just beyond my grasp.
The closest I could come was thinking of “Barbie” as a feminist Pinocchio. A toy (played by an effervescent Margot Robie) wants to become a real live girl. Er, woman. Er, astronaut, brain surgeon, CEO, Supreme Court Justice, President of the United States …
In other words, a plastic model aspiring to be a role model.
It's not that she wants to, exactly. Barbie lives in a perfect plastic world where all the women are named Barbie, almost everything is some shade of pastel, there's always a rainbow in the sky and you never get wet whether going to the beach or taking a shower.
It's just that she has started experiencing sensations she's never had before. Her feet, for instance, have lost their high-heel-shaped arch. Her perfect skin is showing hints of cellulite. And she's having thoughts of – pardon the expression – death.
She can't turn to her partner Ken (Ryan Gosling) for answers. In this, as in all things, Ken is useless. This makes him just like all the other males in Barbie Land, whose names are Ken, too. (Well, except for Alan (Michael Cera) who's clueless in other ways.)
Whatever preconceptions you may have had of Barbie, in her realm it's Ken who's the bimbo. He can't swim or be a lifeguard – for him beach is a verb. He wants to be more than Barbie's friend, but doesn't know how. For him, to be isn't a verb. Without Barbie, there's no such thing as Ken.
For all the depths Ryan Gosling has plumbed in his career, he's even greater at shallow. The more lost Ken gets, the more poignant the portrayal becomes. No wonder Gosling's face is in so many of the Oscar predictions. He's Barbie's barbie.
The endlessly clever script – written by Gerwig and her real-life partner Noah Baumbach – offers a post-graduate degree in gender studies hidden in colorful eye-popping visuals complete with Busby Berkeleyish disco dance numbers.
Director Gerwig is comfortable and assured working on such a grand scale, riffing on Barbie mythology and hiding lots of sly in-jokes in the visual cotton candy.
Apart from their cloying positivity, not all Barbies are created equal, which is why Dua Lipa can play one, and Kate McKinnen can play another. McKinnen is Weird Barbie – the one in the shoebox with her hair cut short, magic marker makeup all over her face, and her legs always doing the splits.
(In my experience, the shoebox is the fate of all Barbies, their nude plastic bodies no longer sources of wonder, or even interest, for the little girl who once cherished them.)
Weird Barbie explains to Robie's stereotypical Barbie that their sort are, in fact, projections of their owners. Her malaise stems from the girl who once owned her, Gloria (America Ferrara), now all grown up and living in Los Angeles with her own daughter.
So it's off to the real world to find Gloria and sort things out, with Ken in tow. They land in Malibu – well, duh – but wind up at the headquarters of the Mattel corporation that not only created the first Barbie doll but also produced this movie. Will Ferrell plays the head doofus in a black suit. The ghost of Ruth Handler (Rhea Pearlman), the woman who invented Barbie, lives in an upstairs apartment.
LA is also where Ken discovers a world not ruled by women. In Barbie's early days they were called male chauvinist pigs, but are now the patriarchy in the script. In other words, guys riding horses, motorcycles, and titanic pickup trucks, always with a brewski in their hands.
Ken's in heaven.
Plastic dolls may not have brains, but “Barbie's” got a lot on its mind. The tyranny of gender roles and myths for openers. The need to discover who you are before it's through. When Ruth Handler, wife of Mattel's founder, first conceived Barbie, she wanted to give girls an alternative to baby dolls. A woman doll. Something aspirational – at least according to the corporate version – offering girls an alternative to the roles of mothers and martyrs.
This conveniently overlooks the wonder of Barbie's anatomy – something between a mannequin and a sex toy with its tiny waist and mountain-range breasts. Plastic strumpets, as a friend of my wife dubbed the early Barbies of the '50s.
Mattel tried to correct the impression – and market the tides of feminism in ensuing decades – creating all those successful career Barbies, not to mention a whole United Nations of other-culture Barbies, with dark skin and hair, and less bizarre anatomies, in their native attire, no less.
For all the cleverness and wisdom of Greta Gerwig and her movie, it's all camouflage for Barbie's true essence: No matter what gender fad is in a vogue at the moment, what Barbie is, and always has been, is a product. She has more in common with a pair of Air Jordans than an actual woman.
How much you love Movie Barbie, or “Air” either, may well hinge on how deeply you believe in capitalism.
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