Moneyball (2011)

By James Ryder

The general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt, Babel), has a problem.  He’s lost his best players to trading and doesn’t have the money to hire adequate replacements.  After meeting stats wiz kid Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, Superbad), Beane decides to bet on a new strategy: hiring flawed players that have statistically high on-base average.  It’s a bargain, the two decide, to get players that have a problem with the dice games, recent injuries or who are otherwise “over-the-hill” but still get on base.  From there, the film depicts the 2002 baseball season as Brand and Beane attempt to prove their method of talent scouting is as valid as spending millions on star players, much to the dismay of long-time insiders, talking head sports commentators, and armchair coaches. 

Despite not containing a significant amount of time depicting the game of baseball being played, the film is an underdog story in the grand Sports Movie tradition.  The poorly funded team must go against the better trained, better funded pros.  Beane is a well drawn character, and his plight is easily understandable to many: do more with less.  The film is frequently humorous, but the humor comes out of the characters and situations rather than trying to create an overly raunchy punch line or contrived set piece.  The film also does something that very few movies do: it lets its characters lie without explaining the lie in the next scene.  When Beane is asked how he’s doing after a big loss and responds “Great!,” it doesn’t need to be explained.

Plays are typically shown via stock footage, though several key game moments are recreated.  Not being a baseball fanatic myself, I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of the trades nor can I offer any commentary on if the statistical method of winning games is a good one.  I have no doubt that the film sanitizes some of the characters’ and players’ behavior. 

Moneyball occasionally flirts with being cheaply sentimental (Beane buddies up with players after they start winning games), its second half begins to focus on game results over characters, and it is perhaps a little overlong.  I don’t think Moneyball is the FILM OF THE YEAR as some have proclaimed, but it’s an intelligent film that trusts its audience to understand where it’s going without spelling out each joke and plot point.  Kudos to director Bennett Miller (Capote) and screenwriters Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and Steven Zaillian (Gangs of New York) for trusting the audience to understand subtlety and for finding the emotional core in what could have been a boring stats movie. 

Phillip Seymour Hoffman also stars.  Moneyball is based on the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis.

© 2011 Beyond the Films