Moneyball (2011)

There are inspirational sports movies, and then there’s Moneyball, which tells an inspirational sports story from the general manager’s point of view. For those unfamiliar, the general manager of a baseball team is the person who ostensibly builds the group of players that winds up on the field; all with whatever amount of money the franchise is able to provide. On the one hand, you have the New York Yankees, who have all the cash in the world to spend. Then there is Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. In Moneyball, he has absolutely nothing to work with. In the wake of the 2001 season, he lost three of his best players to teams far richer than his and was left with essentially nothing to put on the field. Moneyball deals less with the actual game of baseball and more with the strategy behind creating a team, and how Beane was able to create a winning team in an unorthodox way. This is a film that should be incomprehensible and tiresome even to the most devoted baseball fan, but Moneyball turns into an effortlessly watchable film with a fascinating human story at its center. Underdog stories are a dime a dozen in sports films, yet here is an underdog story of a different, more heartbreaking kind. Even with his occasional success, the Beane character in Moneyball is in the midst of an uphill battle that he may never win.

Beane is portrayed in Moneyball by Brad Pitt, who gives a pretty wonderful performance as someone who always feels like he has something to prove. Entering the 2002 baseball season, his team was at a low point and had no resources with which to work. It is at this point he meets the young Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a whiz kid who views baseball in a different way than just about everyone else in the game. Where most are trying to get good-looking kids that make the big play, Brand uses a mathematical formula that determines how to score the most runs. In his eyes, the Oakland Athletics can win by picking up everyone else’s spare parts. (It’s called Sabermetrics, which sounds thrilling, I’m sure.) So that’s precisely what they do, much to the ire of Oakland fans and personnel. Moneyball follows Beane throughout the season as he moves forward with his plan and tries to set his team up for World Series victory.

No doubt this sounds about as thrilling as a two-hour economics lecture delivered by Ben Stein, but Moneyball is a wonderfully written, performed and directed film that is at times downright great. The secret weapon here is no doubt the screenplay by veteran writers Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, which takes what should be an indecipherable topic and makes it completely understandable and engaging. (This was something that Sorkin was able to accomplish with last year’s The Social Network as well, which took high-level computer-speak and somehow made it intelligible.) This is aided by the performances of the consistently great cast, who sell each moment to its fullest extent. When Beane and Brand sit in an office simply exchanging phone calls at the trading deadline, it is exciting because the two of them treat the moment with the utmost urgency. This is not a foreign topic to them, so it is not a foreign topic to us.

For the first hour or so Moneyball just seems downright brilliant, even if it doesn’t quite sustain this power for its entire (overlong) running time. Director Bennett Miller does all he can to give each moment the maximum emotional punch—and for a while it works—but by the end he goes to his bag of tricks a few too many times. (Many critical scenes down the stretch are set to absolute silence, which grows a little old. Plus, one shot toward the film’s climax comes off as more than a bit silly.) The film works best when Miller puts all the work in the hands of his actors, who are more powerful in two lines of dialogue than anything Miller could try. His direction isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination; I just think he overdoes it in a select few moments.

What’s refreshing about Moneyball is that it doesn’t overstate Beane’s accomplishment. Yes, the man turned a lot of people on to a new way of thinking, but the film never claims that Beane was some kind of baseball messiah. If anything, the film doesn’t give him all that happy an ending. To Beane, winning it all is the only option. Until that moment, he won’t feel like anything was really accomplished. This is a film about people who know nothing but losing, and they feel as if that will never change within the current system. Moneyball tells the story of two people who decided to make their own system, knowing that much dirt would be thrown at them in the process. At film’s end, the jury is still out as to whether it was worth it.

GRADE: B+

Moneyball will be released on September 23.