Moneyball
Ah, this is the interesting life
Grade: B
Director: Bennett Miller
Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip
Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, and Kerris Dorsey
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hr. 6 min.
Moneyball may be about an old pastime, baseball,
but it's reminiscent of a film about a more contemporary activity: The Social Network. Both are
about Gen-Y whiz kids rising up and training their trumpets on the walls
safeguarding venerable Jerichos—in Social
Network it was Madison Avenue, while Moneyball looks at how detailed statistical
analysis shook up the tradition-laden world of major league baseball.
As it happens, Aaron Sorkin,
last seen accepting a screenplay Oscar for The
Social Network, also revised writer Steve Zaillian's treatment of Moneyball. The long-gestating Moneyball film project, directed by Bennett Miller
(Capote), adapts Michael Lewis' 2003 book about the Oakland Athletics
and its general manager Billy Beane, who adopted the principles of
"sabermetrics" in identifying undervalued baseball players as a means
for cash-strapped clubs to compete with rich rivals like the New York Yankees
and Boston Red Sox.
Along the way, Beane (played by Brad Pitt) challenges the
sport’s sacred cows, including his own scouts and head coach (Philip Seymour
Hoffman, giving little to do besides scowl a lot), who resent the radical
redefinition of an archaic system of player evaluation foisted by Beane and his
Yale-educated assistant, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).
Moneyball is an
enjoyable, entertaining movie thanks to breezy dialogue (Sorkin’s unmistakable
contribution) and the performances by Pitt and Hill. Their contemporary Abbott
& Costello act guide the film, with Beane as the competitive, jocular
ex-jock and a Brand as the portly egghead. Hill, best known for his Judd Apatow
comedies, impresses in his first high-profile dramatic role. And while those
who contend age has finally turned Pitt into a good actor didn’t pay attention
to his mid-90s turns in 12 Monkeys, Fight Club and Kalifornia, what has changed is that the 47-year-old actor now
sports a more weathered visage for the camera to exploit.
Still, that recommendation remains equivocal, as Moneyball is also a flawed work that
fails to emulate the moxie of its protagonists. The film focuses primarily on
Beane, a divorcé whose teenage daughter periodically pops up to strum a ditty
she composed about dad that sounds like a B-side off the Juno soundtrack. Beane’s own playing career was a washout, and the
most intriguing moments of Moneyball are
those that wonder whether his embrace of computer statistical analysis is his
way of exacting revenge on the stodgy scouts who once imprudently advised him
to turn down a college scholarship in favor of a pro contract.
However, it’s Brand who is the purveyor of this new system,
making the script’s failure to develop his backstory an egregious omission.
This is particularly puzzling since Brand is fictitious character (Paul
DePodesta, Beane real-life right-hand man, figures in Lewis’ book but asked
that his name not be used in the film), leaving the filmmakers free to explore
why a nerdy, seemingly nonathletic Ivy Leaguer would apply his gifts to
baseball analysis. Was it to get back at the jocks who teased him as a child,
his way of fitting into a long inaccessible world, or something else? The
possibilities are rich, but unfortunately the payoff is miserly.
The climax to Moneyball
boils down to a will-he-or-won’t-he affair over whether Beane would accept
a lucrative offer from the Red Sox and their owner John Henry (Arliss Howard), whose
soliloquy on the sea change brought by sabermetrics is a highpoint. The
sequence is meant to call-back the last time Beane had to decide whether or not
to take the money. A more skillful treatment, however, would have turned his
conversation with Henry into a tragic arc, the moment Beane realizes this new
method developed to level the playing field for the have-nots is destined to be
co-opted as yet another weapon for the benefit of wealthy haves.
Like a batter checking his swing, Miller seems torn between
the crowd-pleasing tropes of the baseball movie genre – the Big Hit in the Big
Game – and a commitment to distilling the sport down to a binary essence.
Indeed, the film teaches us little about the particulars of sabermetrics (the
term itself is never uttered), leaving the viewer to sometimes wonder what all
the fuss is about.
There’s nothing in Moneyball
as metaphorically audacious as the dueling frat parties in The Social Network – one a stereotypical bash where girls are bused
in to serve as objects of drunken revelry, the other an online gathering where
the coeds’ digitized images are uploaded and ranked by participants according
to their relative attractiveness.
The most subversive Miller ever gets in Moneyball are slow-motion montages of batters taking a base on
balls. In the end, the film is much like a sporting event – a lot of fun but
ultimately a finite distraction.
Neil Morris
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