Review of Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill.
The baseball drama Moneyball is indeed for all fans of the game, but it may be targeted specifically for a certain type of fan in the stands. Among the guys with their chests painted, the guys with the foam fingers on and the wide-eyed dreamers who are swept up in the poetry of the game are the guys who stay sitting the whole time, scribbling notes into the margins of their programs and doing all the math. For them, Moneyball will be bliss. For those of us curious just what the heck they are scribbling in the margins, Moneyball is fascinating.
The film is based on real events in 2002, when OaklandA’s general manager Billy Beane attempted a literal game-changer. His team doesn’t have the money to replace the star players being bought up by teams like the Yankees or Red Sox, and when faced with the daunting task of replacing his superstars, Beane (Brad Pitt) decides not to replace them player-for-player, but to build a new kind of team. Partnered with a whiz kid associate (Jonah Hill) who he steals from another team’s home office, they invoke a strategy called “moneyball.” They nitpick through player stats and recruit guys that maybe aren’t superstars, but get on base enough that when taken together, they would become a winning – and affordable – team. Beane calls it the equivalent of counting cards in Las Vegas.
Bennett Miller has directed a movie that feels very different from other baseball films. Oh, there’s some of the usual “metaphor for life” stuff, but most of it is set in the off-season and is set in a workplace that could be yours or mine. Remember the glitz and glamour of Jerry Maguire, the movie about the sports agent? Moneyball is the Anti-Maguire. There aren’t atheltes screaming “show me the money,” agents taking multiple cell calls at once and executive assistants who are as hot as Playboy models – there are small cubicles, calls placed by secretaries because bosses can’t figure out the phones and ex-wives scheduling weekends with the kids. Disagreements aren’t settled with fisticuffs or histrionics. Guys are shown the door and leave quietly. People who don’t get along just don’t talk to each other when they pass each other in the hall.
The players are just as “real.” Hill’s character describes the new A’s as kind of an “Islandof Misfit Toys.” In a lesser movie, the team would have indeed been misfits – to paint them as underdogs, they’d be weird – each with a laughable personality trait or over-emphasized stereotype. Instead, the quirks are things like “he looks funny when he throws” or “his girlfriend isn’t that hot.” The movie could have been turned into some kind of Major League ripoff screwball comedy. Instead, it stays grounded (we’ll assume Moneyball is pretty close to real life – it’s based on the book by journalist Michael Lewis -- although it’s probably safe to say dialogue master Aaron Sorkin fine-tuned the pacing a bit).
Instead of seeing what unfolds through the eyes of the players on the field, we have the point of view of a spectator and businessman – heck, Billy Beane doesn’t even like to watch the games in the stadium because he thinks he’ll jinx it. He himself is a former player for whom the dream is over. The majority of us aren’t pro baseball players no matter how much we dream of it. Pitt is our everyman, and he’s very good at it. You might not instantly think the pretty boy movie star could be relatable, but he’s pulled off all kinds of roles before from homeless psychos to vampires to old men aging in reverse – why couldn’t he play an average guy? Hill is also very good as the nervous stat man, and Philip Seymour Hoffman does great representing “the old school” in manager Art Howe.
Yes, the first great baseball movie in a long time isn’t about a superstar player winning the big game under the bight lights. It’s about statistics and a winning streak by, of all teams, the OaklandA’s. And yet a lot of baseball fans are anxious to see it. That actually makes sense in the modern sports world. This is not necessarily the movie for guys who fantasize about playing baseball – it’s the movie for guys who play fantasy baseball.