Moneyball

Originally posted to the DMI Review on 4/29/13

Inside Baseball

by Hunter Isham

        Every now and then I'll have to begin a review by revealing my bias for certain films, the ones that I already have a vested interest in before having seen them. Moneyball is one of those films. The main reason? The script was co-written by my favorite writer of film and television, Aaron Sorkin (I could go on and on about The West Wing, but I'll spare you that for now). The other reason I was rooting for Moneyball was that it's all about my hometown team, the Oakland Athletics. I might as well have bought my ticket the day Sorkin came on board, something I was not so eager to do when he signed on for "The Facebook Movie"—*shudder* (which is how I  processed the magnificent Social Network before it actually saw the light of day), but I digress. Even films I'm unwaveringly eager to see can be massive disappointments, but Moneyball quite thankfully turned out to be a smart, funny, and moving sports drama that sits easily in the pantheon of great films about baseball.
        Moneyball is an adaptation of Michael Lewis' book of the same name, which chronicled A's General Manager Billy Beane's (Brad Pitt) attempt to use sabermetrics to round up a group of talented yet undervalued players on a shoestring budget. The time between the 2001 and 2002 baseball seasons saw the A's lose star players like Jason Giambi to well-funded teams like the New York Yankees, whose budget of about $150 million was a war chest to be reckoned with when compared to Oakland's $39 million. Introduced to sabermetrics by Peter Brand (Jonah Hill's composite character partly based on Paul DePodesta), Beane decides to buck the trend of traditional baseball scouting and recruit seemingly worthless players in an attempt to get a championship team out of that small budget. As Brand explains, it's not about finding another Giambi, but rather about finding the right combination of players who can, based on their stats, deliver the same number of runs Giambi and his fellow former A's once did.
        A film built largely around statistics might sound exceedingly boring, but Sorkin and co-writer Steve Zaillian (who wrote Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List) keep things fast and funny, and do an excellent job of explaining how all the math works without either boring us or making our heads spin. Director Bennett Miller is similarly skillful in balancing the strategic plays both on and off the field, as well as Beane's lonely personal life and attempts to spend time with his daughter. For all the wonderful work done by the talented group behind the scenes on Moneyball, the true heavy lifting is done by the cast, who takes a rich story and makes it a highly personal film.
        Brad Pitt is quite honestly a revelation as Billy Beane. I've enjoyed him in more comedic fare, like Ocean's Eleven and Inglourious Basterds, where he cuts loose and has some fun in which the audience can join, but I've never given much thought to his dramatic work. Not that he hasn't been good in the past, but just that I haven't really seen his more serious films. As Beane, his playful persona from Ocean's is apparent, but with a jaded emptiness that lies just beneath, keeping him more subdued, and consequently more human, than I've ever seen him while still tossing out the occasional zinger. Jonah Hill, another actor I know from comedy, gives a breakout dramatic turn as the statistician who helps Beane guide the Athletics in a new direction. He plays against type as a quiet, brainy individual who is often the smartest guy in a room in which he's hardly welcome. Pitt and Hill together form a kind of odd couple as they work together against baseball scouts and Art Howe (the reluctant manager of the A's played by a gruff Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and the result is a chemistry that gives the film its pulse.
        Moneyball is a unique sports film in that it puts the focus on the politics and methods of how playing the game is made possible. It's a fresh approach that results in an equally fresh and intelligent film, one that, if it has any weaknesses, is hindered only by the real-life story that saw the A's never going as far they had always hoped. But Moneyball is a tale of victory off the field and in life, striving to go against the grain and change the way people think about baseball. "Any other team wins the World Series, good for them," Beane says to Brand, "But if we win, on our budget, with this team... we'll have changed the game. And that's what I want. I want it to mean something." Moneyball is a film that at its core is about that old adage, "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game," except here the focus is inside baseball in the front office. The fact that the Oakland A's have remained  both the perennially underfunded, under-attended underdogs and a regular wildcard team of Major League Baseball is a testament to the work done by Billy Beane as their general manager. Moneyball shows how even as we lose the little fights, we can still survive with some creative perseverance, redefining what it means to be champions. 9.5/10