Moneyball (2011)

Featuring more calculators than curve balls, Moneyball is not your typical baseball movie. Then again, the film tells the story of the 2002 Oakland A’s, and they were hardly a typical baseball team. An adaptation of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the film chronicles the up-and-down season, run by real-life general manager Billy Beane, that changed the hundred-year-old game.

As the film opens, the A’s lose a playoff series to the New York Yankees, dashing their championship hopes. A moment later, a screen contrasting the Yanks’ $125 million budget with Oakland’s paltry $39 million reveals the fix inherent in the game. Some teams, with their major markets and deep pockets, can afford to pay top dollar for the best players in the world. And some teams have their top players like Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen poached right from under them.

That’s the position Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is in when we meet him. Unable to get a penny more to replace his stars, Beane consults his team of scouts. Their world is one of dingy, yellowed game rooms filled with gaudy nylon jackets and Dixie Cup spittoons. It’s also a world built on the conventional wisdom that you can predict how well a player will do based on things like his physical build, how fast he runs, and whether or not he has an ugly girlfriend. As we learn from a series of flashbacks, Beane had all those “right” things when he was scouted out of high school–and away from a full-ride scholarship at Stanford–but washed out anyway. He knows he needs to play the game differently; he just isn’t sure how.

At least not until he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), fresh from Yale’s hallowed ivy walls with a brand spanking new economics degree and not a moment spent on a baseball diamond. The shy guy is armed only with a much-derided book from the 1970s about a system called sabermetrics and a wicked penchant for Excel. With those, he figures out a way to assemble a team with an impressive record of getting on base (and thus, scoring runs) for pennies on the dollar. These guys may throw funny or be too old. They may even be catchers that Beane’s coaches have to turn into first-basemen. Hidden in there, though, is a championship-winning team.

If you’re a fan of sports movies like I am, this is where you expect the Hollywood underdog story to emerge. You know, the one where the rag-tag bunch of losers bond and realize that none of them may be stars individually, but together they’re a team capable of taking on anything. Through on-field montages, you see that catcher become the best first baseman ever and that funny-throwing pitcher hit his stride. And you wait for it to build to a third-act showdown with their old nemesis the Yankees.

Right. Did I mention Moneyball was a long-time pet project of Steven Soderbergh, ultimately written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Capote helmsman Bennett Miller? So that doesn’t happen. This film is refreshingly free of all the predictable schmaltz.

What you do get from Moneyball is a well-made movie. Miller has great instincts for the film’s pacing and shrewdly cuts in flashbacks of a young Billy (Reed Thompson), as well as tender, but unsentimental, scenes of the adult Beane with his daughter. It helps to create a fully developed lead character who is not as brash as his baseball persona would have you believe.

Miller smartly uses archival game and announcer footage as a means of shortening what could have been long, expositional jags. Moneyball does still have something of a seventh-inning stretch (after Beane finds the method but before the team hits its record-breaking 20-game streak) with not a lot of time spent on the actual baseball field. But Sorkin works his magic to turn statistical chatter and “moneyball” number crunching into witty, sparky dialogue. It’s the same trick he pulled with last year’s The Social Network, and it’s just as effective the second time around.

It helps that supporting players Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who puts in a believably grumpy performance as A’s coach Art Howe) are terrific at delivering Sorkin’s cleverly scripted dialogue. Of course, none of that would mean a thing without a standout performance by Brad Pitt. Beane’s story, his likeability and believability are what holds this movie–essentially about actuarial sciences–together.

Pitt’s face spends so much time annoying me from the cover of supermarket tabloids, it’s easy to forget that his natural onscreen ease is the real reason that he’s a star. His easygoing smile, mixed with a nervous, manic energy (Beane doesn’t always believe the hype, it’s clear) and megawatt charisma keep all eyes glued to him. In one scene, Pitt portrays Beane carrying on four simultaneous conversations to make a key trade. His fast-talking gear switches are seamless, smooth and a legitimate delight to watch. You want that guy to win. And even when he doesn’t, he makes you think he has. Someone hand that man his Oscar nomination, please.

That’s another way that Moneyball is different than other baseball movies. Although the Red Sox borrowed his methodology two years later to break the curse of the Bambino, Billy Beane is still waiting for his winning season. Still, this unconventional movie about an unconventional team goes to show that it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.