Netflix and Film: The Last Dance and The Assistant Harry Mount
HARRY MOUNT THE LAST DANCE THE ASSISTANT
Interested in basketball? No, nor was I – until I saw The Last Dance, the ten-part Netflix documentary about Michael Jordan and his team, the Chicago Bulls.
Jordan is a basketball player, m'lud; the most successful one in history. Now retired (he's 57), he was the colossus of the game in the 1990s, winning the NBA Finals for the Bulls six times. Today he's a billionaire, cushioned by the fortune from his Air Jordan basketball shoes, must-have footwear for American teenagers since 1984.
To watch him in action is to see a man defying gravity. When he starts to fly, he borrows extra seconds from God mid-air as he shuffles the ball up and down, from hand to hand, before the inevitable slam dunk.
His ability in the air is so supreme that the Bulls' sworn enemies, the Detroit Pistons, confess their whole strategy is to batter him and keep him on the ground – once he's flying, he's scoring.
The series cherry-picks from 500 hours of unaired footage from the '97-'98 season, when the Bulls won the NBA championship.
So there are plenty of shots of Jordan magically hovering five feet off the ground. There's also lots of footage of his nearly-as-famous teammate
Dennis Rodman, celebrated for his rainbow-dyed hair; his ex-girlfriend, Madonna; and his best friend, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator. You don't have to like basketball to be compelled by the Jordan story: to find out what happens when you're the richest, most famous sportsman in America – and, what's more, you're wonderful-looking. The cliché would demand he has some sort of downfall – but in fact it never materialises. Yes, Jordan gambles heavily – but not enough to put a dent in his billions. And he develops a worrying taste for ultra-boxy suits that make him look like he's trapped in a mammoth cigarette packet. Jordan also develops an ocean-going arrogance. At one chilling moment, an autograph-hunter asks for his signature, and Jordan doesn't even look at him. Instead, he flinches in the direction of a gofer, who duly dispatches the poor fan out of Jordan's line of sight. At the height of his fame, in 1993, his beloved father is murdered by robbers. A distraught Jordan retires and has a go at becoming a baseball player. But he soon returns to triumph with the Bulls. That clichéd downfall never comes. Even Jordan's enormous ego eventually comes down to earth. He realises that, however gifted he is, he wins more if he involves the lesser mortals on his team – and so he starts passing to them. When he does, the Bulls pull off that epic run of NBA championships.
The series touches, too, on race in America. The players are predominantly black; the owners and coaches white. That works fine with the Bulls' coach, Phil Jackson, who forms a tight bond with Jordan. It doesn't work so well with the villain of the show, Jerry Krause, the Bulls' general manager – diminutive, plump, cross-eyed and fantastically bad at managing the players who rejoice in ridiculing him. A joy to watch.
The same can't be said of The Assistant (available on Curzon Home Cinema), a thinly disguised, fictional version of the Harvey Weinstein story. You never see the grotesque, bullying Weinstein movie-mogul figure. Instead, you follow his poor assistant, wiping up post-coital stains on the office floor, lining up erectile hypodermic needles and juggling the aspiring actresses waiting to be ‘auditioned' by the mogul.
The film, directed and written by Kitty Green, is nowhere near as compelling as documentaries about Weinstein or even footage of Weinstein going to court. It has none of the wit of The Devil Wears Prada or the skill in skewering work life of The Office – and it has no plot.
Instead, you get endless shots of Jane the assistant (a valiant Julia Garner) washing up mugs and working the photocopier in washed-out, off-white interiors. They think this is what they call ‘artistic'. It's what I call ‘boring'.
One of the effects of lockdown is that people are watching, on the same screen, quicksilver, witty, biting TV series and baggily edited, self-indulgent gloomfest films. When Michael Jordan takes on The Assistant, there's no contest.