Moneyball lucidly, and often comically, pays earthy homage to the lustre of baseball’s stature as “America’s pastime.” Just beneath the surface of a story arc portraying the maverick ideas of rebel general manager Billy Beane lurks a playful and endearing love of the game and its characters. It’s brought to life by Brad Pitt’s best film performance to date. Beane’s new-breed, statistics-driven player analysis is meant for a low-budget franchise like his Oakland A’s to forge an even playing field with the far richer New York Yankee type organizations as he is about to lose three major free agents from a 2001 100-game winning playoff team, Beane hooks onto special schlepy Yale nerd Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and promotes him to assistant GM to the begrudging surprise of his jaded longtime player scouts. The scouts are steeped in baseball’s longheld traditions and his head scout condescendingly lectures the younger Beane. Philip Seymour Hoffman does a fine turn as manager Art Howe. Howe, too, has little use for Beane and their scenes together are pure oil and water.
Pitt shakes off the non-believers like so many flies. He not only demurs when they disagree with his player assessments, he eventually goes so against the grain he decides to trade perhaps their “best” player at midseason–a move that gives even Hill some pause.
Like most excellent sports movies, Moneyball ends on a miracle-like winning crescendo. Likewise, it also strikes emotional chords as it is nicely set in relief against Beane’s total dedication to his 12-year old daughter to which he’s a nonncustodial parent. The daughter motif is heartwarming and genuine (and lends itself to Beane’s own often fatherly cameraderie with Brand). The winning streak, while excitingly portrayed, could have contained a return to the fractured relationship between Beane and Howe to see how it was affected by all the winning. Did his nay-saying adversaries react to his success in bringing on the 20-game winning streak after he pulled a series of trade deadline deals? Or were they too busy (particularly Howe) taking the credit for it?
In taking on the predisposed vanities of the traditions of a sport accumulated over a hundred years, Beane brings his own cock-suredness. Portrayed as the classic loner outsider, he revolutionizes a sport with a zero tolerance for innovation. Pitt not only makes deals with the savvy of an all-wise lunatic, he occasionally ventures away from his self-imposed no-mingling-with-the-players rule to give his players just the right amount of pep. Or hell. The screenplay, co-written by Adam Sorkin, is often on a par with his script for last year’s marvelous The Social Network. The film is the secong outing from director Bennett Miller (Capote).
Is Moneyball of interest to non-baseball fans? Yes. Beane is such a winning character and his task such a compelling longshot we can’t help but tie it to larger things than baseball. The Michael Lewis book upon with the film is based has the subtitle “The Art of Winning An Unfair Game.” Who doesn’t like an underdog with charisma?
8 on base percentages out of 10
