Director: Bennett Miller
Writer(s): Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, story by Stan Chervin, based on the book from Michael Lewis
As humanity becomes more advanced and more intelligent, any major changes to an industry are going to be met with skepticism and resistance. Furthermore, as society advances, we also become more impersonal; what was once the realm of common sense, intuition and experience can become a matter of numbers, statistics, and 'the books'. Baseball, the American past time usually held on a somewhat holy pedestal, is no exception to the rule.
"Moneyball" is the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who finds himself pushing baseball in a radical new direction against much resistance. The reasons are highly practical: coming off an unexpectedly good season in which they made the World Series, teams with higher payrolls have taken the A's star players: Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, Jason Isringhausen. With only one-third of the funds as their competition, Beane is left with the proposition of replacing a group of players he doesn't have the money to replace.
His brain trust of scouts offers little help. The older men suggest some good-looking prospects; they talk about their body shape, how good they looked in tryouts, the raw numbers, the same methods used for decades. The group doesn't give off a vibe of the wave of the future; one scout has to take a moment to adjust his hearing aid; another misses an easy pop culture reference. More than one is chewing tobacco.
During a routine trading visit to the Cleveland Indians, Beane meets 25-year old Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), and notices both his unusual look for a member of baseball management (he looks like a grad student who is happy to be there), but also the odd sway he seems to hold with the Indians GM.
Hill is best known for his awkward, nerdy humor in Judd Apatow movies like "Superbad" and "Get Him to the Greek"; to his credit, he uses these same instincts to find the right balance of humor and intelligence in his character (comparable to, say, Adam Sandler in "Punch Drunk Love"). Brand is a Yale economics major who has taken an interest in the works of Bill James, who used statistical methods to a new system of baseball player evaluation. Brand is a man of numbers; while Beane sees Johnny Damon as a precious entity in desperate need of immediate replacement, Brand sees "a good starter" who has been overvalued by the world of baseball. Beane at first rejects Brand's ideas out of hand. Then he mulls them over. Then he steals Brand from Cleveland and makes him assistant GM.
Beane and Brand apply their statistical methods to create a team that is as undervalued statistically as they are unimpressive to the scouting crew. Pitcher Chad Bradford (Casey Bond) throws in a 'weird' style. Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) was a decent catcher who has suffered nerve damage, and seems downright surprised when Beane gives him a job offer and confused when they tell him they want him on first base. David Justice (Stephen Bishop) was a star player at one point, but is now 'old'; the Yankees basically pay Oakland to get rid of him; he hasn't quite gotten over his own stardom. None of their raw stats are all that impressive. Coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has a particular disdain for Beane's methods (and, in one hilarious sequence, subtly expresses his opinion of Brand). Hoffman plays Howe less as a character than as a representation of the old school of thought in baseball. He is, after all, the guy who has to decide how to play these misfits. Beane has very specific instructions on how to play these guys properly, but Howe isn't convinced by the fact Brand crunched a series of numbers on a computer. A power struggle ensues.
Baseball fans will likely know how the season turned out, and any astute viewer can infer that if they're making a movie about it, something interesting must've happened. If you can go in blind, I'd recommend it.
The movie is rounded out by Billy Beane's personal story and family life. He has good reason to be suspicious of the established baseball system. At a young age, he was seen as a potential star prospect, enough that he was convinced to walk away from a Stanford scholarship. Yet his career, to say the least, didn't go as planned. Without overdoing it, both the writers and Pitt effectively portray Beane as a man with regret, perhaps even a slight grudge against the old school of thought; beyond truly believing in his new ideas, he's out to prove a point. Pay particular attention to the scene where Beane asks Brand how the young version of himself would've fit into his statistical methods.
Beane also has a healthy relationship with his daughter Casey (Kerris Dorsey), despite getting divorced from her mother (Robin Wright). For all the snappy dialogue that comes with trading players, the stoic method in which he can tell someone their career is over, and the cynical methods in which he deals with opposition such as Coach Howe, it's the simple scenes where he helps his daughter conduct a song that we see Beane at his most human. Beane makes a major life decision at the end of the film that some will find inexplicable; they should watch these scenes a bit closer.
The strong effort is anchored by a strong script by Zaillian and Sorkin. Sorkin's writing can sometimes verge on overindulgent (this hampered the otherwise good "The Social Network") but they find the right balance here by mainly focusing on Beane as a character. Director Bennett Miller ("Capote") compliments this by allowing scenes to flow naturally and giving them room to breath; there's a common conception that sports movies need to be action-packed and adrenaline-fueled, but "Moneyball" finds itself by going in the opposite direction (in fact, actual shots of baseball being played on the field are highly limited). There's probably a "baseball is boring" joke in that last paragraph, so you can make your own if you'd like.
WHAT THE FILM SETS OUT TO DO: Two-fold: tell the story of how introduction of statistical methods changed the way GMs approached baseball, and do so while exploring Billy Beane as a character.
RESULT: Basic success on both counts. The few scenes of Peter Brand getting into the specifics of the statistical methods were largely interesting, and probably could've been expanded upon a bit (there's possibly the risk of alienating an audience, but this is a Smart Movie anyway).
SIDE THOUGHTS:
- Philip Seymour Hoffman can be an amazing actor; here, he's largely relegated to a side role. He fulfills it well enough, but it can't help but feel a bit like a lost opportunity.
- Outside of a comedic scene in which she's forced to make small talk with Billy Beane and pretend to care about baseball, Robin Wright is highly perfunctory as his ex-wife Sharon and doesn't get much to do
- The song at the end is surprisingly catchy
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