Peter Brand runs the stats with Oakland A's GM Billy Beane in "Moneyball."
(Bennett Miller, 2011)
November 9, 2011
by Joel Crary
I don’t much care for sports. I suppose it follows that I don’t much care for sports movies, which often hold tight to a predictable formula. A team loses for a bit, then they win when it counts. Or they lose when it counts, but everyone involved wins on a personal level, which is what really counts. Insert a lot of slow motion shots for dramatic effect, maybe a few closeups of the scoreboard. At the root of it all is The Love of The Game, which most sport movies exploit. Love of the game can be transformed into a love of the movie about the game with little effort.
It’s not that “Moneyball” is lacking these ingredients. The slow motion shots are there, as are the scoreboard closeups at the moment of truth. Hushed conversations are had about the love of the game, the purity of it, how it’s been tainted by money in one way or another. And to be fair, it has. Baseball fans love a good underdog story, and these days underdogs are characterized by the amount of money a club has at its disposal to outfit the best team it can. There’s a reason why the Yankees and Red Sox were popping up so often in World Series tournaments at the turn of the century. They just plain had the money to do it.
In 2001 the Oakland Athletics, a ball club with a third of the Yankees’ bankroll, made it nearly all the way on talent alone. Nearly all the way is never good enough in sports, and three of the A’s best players were traded away. Ex-major-league protégé and general manager Billy Beane, 44, found himself face to face with the old guard when formulating moves for the next season, and there are great scenes in “Moneyball” where Beane (Brad Pitt) has to contend with their seemingly archaic attitudes about player looks and personalities. Who cares about their police records if they get on base?
On a trade mission in Cleveland, Beane ended up nabbing not a player, but assistant to the general manager Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale economics graduate with obvious influence. What an economist knows about baseball is “Moneyball”‘s chief concern; in well-scripted scenes, Brand takes Beane through some surprising player statistics that most clubs pay no attention to. Brand was a follower of Bill James, a pariah of the baseball community, a security guard at a pork and beans factory who came up with predictive algorithms that would give teams a lot of wins. Brand liked Chad Bradford for the mound, a guy organizations wouldn’t touch because he threw funny.
When the season starts, “Moneyball” becomes about the tensions in the Athletics camp as the old guard becomes increasingly frustrated with Beane’s nonsensical calls, none of which are resulting in wins. Despite his insistence on putting former catcher Scott Hatteberg at first base, nerve-damaged elbow and all, manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) overrode him time and again until Beane simply traded the player he was using. The man had a terrific head for trades that worked extraordinarily well alongside Brand’s statistical analysis, and together their execution took the A’s to an unprecedented 20-win streak. “Moneyball”‘s best scenes involve the deals – players are handed their walking papers, negotiations happen at a lightning pace over the intercom, all with authentic dialogue that never veers into the esoteric.
Director Bennett Miller, whose last film was 2005′s “Capote,” lends his sports movie a washed-out look and punctuates it with some polished sequences to ignite passions. Yes, the gratuitous victory moments are there, but they complement the outlying story in a different way than most films of this ilk – once baseball become all about lining up the stats correctly and less about the gut feeling that accompanies decisions, what’s the point in watching? Thematically, the movie examines the line between the often inconceivable amount of money thrown at players and managers and the necessity for imperfections in the games themselves. The fans want to see it all, every last compelling story, but when baseball becomes too perfect, too much about the figures, its heart and soul are lost.
This is a subtly powerful performance by Pitt, who plays a man who can’t express himself in anything outside of measured decrees and momentary bursts of physical brutality. A lot of smashed furniture is left in his wake, sparked by something as matter-of-fact as a stolen base on a television screen. In his talented daughter (Kerris Dorsey), he sees the promise he had as a ball player ready to jump on his dream of playing in the majors, not yet aware of what would happen to his confidence. That loss has stayed with him, and becomes the driving force of his need to change the game completely.
Adapting the Michael Lewis book, screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin give Beane a character arc that never quite reaches its peak, and that’s the whole point. Beane is still down there in Oakland, trying to win the game that matters. Maybe he won’t, even if he does. It’s a conclusion typical of a sports movie, to be sure, but there’s one moment in “Moneyball” that sets it above many of the baseball flicks that came before it. Brand shows Beane a video of a player who was so petrified of rounding first that he dove back for the base, unaware that he’d hit a home run. “It’s a metaphor,” Brand says, and it’s one that “Moneyball” knows exactly how to work with.
