Baseball. America’s National Pastime, and a complete mystery to everybody else (ok, ok, apart from some Cubans and some Japanese). So here’s a two-hour film about it: Enjoy!
Moneyball tells the story of Oakland Athletics general manager Bill Beane, and how he used statistical analysis and a value-for-money approach to assemble a team of relative misfits that went on the longest unbeaten run in the history of professional baseball. Bear with me, I promise there’s interesting stuff ahead.
Beane (Brad Pitt) has just had a hugely successful year with the A’s but, with the smallest budget of any Major League Baseball team, all of his best players jump ship for bigger, better contracts. Tasked to replace them, he ends up looking for players at the Cleveland Indians and stumbles upon an advisor to his Indians counterpart whose role he can’t quite figure out. This advisor has a name, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and turns out to be using statistical analysis to rate and judge players. Beane, frustrated at ‘the usual way’ of doing business and the heavy reliance of his scouts on instinct to judge a player’s talent, is suitably impressed by Brand’s laptop and spreadsheets, and offers him a job as an assistant with the A’s. Cue Beane and Brand taking on all of the old guard in his coaching and scouting divisions, much frustration, distrust, wheeler-dealing and pseudo-revolution until lots of baseball happens, and then you end up with a film.
That was not the interesting stuff, but a brief synopsis gets all of these caveats out of the way:
1) THERE WILL BE BASEBALL.
2) THERE WILL BE PEOPLE LOOKING AT COMPUTERS AND TALKING ABOUT STATISTICS.
3) THERE WILL BE STUFF YOU ALMOST CERTAINLY WONT KNOW OR CARE ABOUT.
You should suck it up. This is a brilliantly smart and engaging story. It’s not about baseball, it’s about a determination to change the way things are done, to defy received wisdom and take a chance on better ideas. Beane is faced with a sceptical team owner, a reluctant staff, a roster of players with a mixture of vaulting egos and unimpressive records and an intransigent head coach (the inexplicably miscast and underused Philip Seymour Hoffman), all of whom initially defy his new experiments in team selection. The story comes to focus on Beane’s personal redemption; as a former player hyped by scouts who failed to deliver, he feels that the true worth of a player can never be determined by experience or instinct, and his endorsement of Brand’s statistical analysis is at times portrayed as an extension of this. Going from redemption and touching on pride, loyalty, rejection and hope, the narrative imperfectly and gloriously encapsulates what it is like to be involved in sports - whether as a player, staff or a fan - and drags the viewer into the actual baseball scenes not for love of the game but for what the game does to people. As the A’s approach their vital game to break the unbeaten record, the film becomes genuinely moving, and as a man who has never enjoyed baseball I was tantalisingly on the edge of my seat.
Most of this emotional involvement is brought about by a brilliantly understated performance by Pitt. While he is seemingly bombastic, confident and cleverly underhanded around co-workers Beane is revealed as almost a kind of everyman, making his last stand against the system which has let him down so often before. His frustration at the intransigence of those around him, and the attempts to hide his fears for his increasingly unstable job from his daughter, make up the bulk of the film’s second act. This is a solo piece, everyone around pales into perfectly adequate-ness; as Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman in particular are simply never given that much to do, it’s very hard to invest anything emotionally in their characters. Pitt carries the responsibility with aplomb and proves once again that his versatility is his greatest asset.
Unsurprisingly, the script sparkles. Aaron Sorkin simply further cements his place as the non-fiction adapter-of-choice for engaging, witty and intelligent dialogue, and combined with original screenwriter Steve Zaillian’s wealth of experience the narrative never drags or feels unnecessary. For a two-hour film, this feels lean, taut and extremely easy to follow while never sacrificing its intelligence; the trademark quickfire conversations and deadpan scene-ending final lines we are becoming accustomed to from Sorkin are present and delivered with expert timing. Christopher Nolan’s favourite cinematographer Wally Pfister takes control of the lens as Director of Photography and the use of light is exemplary. No need for screen flares when the perfect natural light of dusk or a bright afternoon in the ballpark can set the mood for any scene, so this film looks really good too. While it looks really good though, the direction is competent and fairly pedestrian. Apart from a ‘STATS MONTAGE’ scene and an extended ‘BASEBALL RUN MONTAGE’ there is little to commend or condemn about Bennett Miller’s work, although his personal friendship with Philip Seymour Hoffman may explain the latter’s casting in a role very unsuited to his talents.
All in all, this is an excellent film, but it is not a classic. While Pitt is excellent in an excellently written role, there is just not enough by way of supporting characters or cast to truly make this a brilliant piece. A great genre film, certainly, and up there with the best sports films (fiction or non-) that I can think of. One of the films of the year so far, probably, although with the heavy focus on one character, the Sorkin re-write and the unobtrusive direction this feels like this year’s The Social Network with a less universal backdrop. That said, go see it. I mean, it’s definitely better than baseball.
