MONEYBALL – The Review

MONEYBALL tells the story of the resurgent Oakland A’s under the leadership of General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) beginning in the 2001 post season when his team had just lost its three top players (Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen) to better-funded and larger market competitors. Oakland could not afford to replace them with comparable talent and the team’s future looked grim. The solution comes in the form of portly young Yale grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) whose simple idea is to  replace them with cheap players with good statiscal odds of getting on base. Beane subscribes to Brand’s theories much to the displeasure of manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and head scout Grady Fuson (Ken Medlock,) who are convinced this strategy will be the final nail in the coffin for their struggling team. Beane stocks the A’s with has-beens and misfits that no other teams wants. It’s this ragtag group of veteran and rookie cast-offs who come together under the visionary leadership of a general manager who dared to think outside the box and changed the way the game is played.

MONEYBALL is not the action-packed sports outing one may be expecting. Director Bennett Miller (CAPOTE) spends very little time focusing on the game of baseball itself. Beane doesn’t even attend the games (he’s convinced his presence will be a jinx) and neither does, with the exception of the final game in team’s 20-game winning streak, the film. It’s not the typical underdog sports story nor does it follow the predictable story arc of leading up to a long-shot homer. It’s the anti-NATURAL, a sports movie not just about managers and players but about strategy and numbers and algorithms and statistics and more numbers. In lesser hands, MONEYBALL could have been dull and wonkish, but pro scribes Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian provide a script with sharp dialogue, humor, and just enough baseball lingo so that everyone can follow. The excitement found in a series of scenes with Brad Pitt on the phone negotiating are as well-realized as one could imagine and as funny as anything I’ve seen on the big screen this year.

Despite its docudrama trappings, MONEYBALL display plenty of emotion and sentiment in telling the uplifting but often sad personal story of Beane. Pitt plays him as a man willing to embrace change after stumbling through a disappointing baseball career first as a strongly-recruited but failed professional player (played in flashbacks by  Reed Thompson), then a scout, and finally a washed-up GM. He has a decent relationship with his ex-wife (Robin Wright) and 12-year old daughter but lives for the game. It’s a complex character, charming and flawed, and Pitt has never been better. Jonah Hill seems an odd casting choice as Brand, based on Paul DePodesta, an athletic man who went on to be GM of the Dodgers. I guess Hill was cast to play up the wide-eyed dorkiness crucial to the film’s humor, and thanks to his revelatory performance, it totally works. As the often-confused head coach Art Howe, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s role isn’t large but he delivers on every single scene he’s in and he seems real. Director Bennett Miller sidesteps sports movie cliches until he gets to the sequence showing how Oakland scraped to their 20th consecutive victory where he pours it on but at that point, after all the stats and numbers, it’s a welcome bromide. MONEYBALL opens with the Mickey Mantle quote “It’s amazing what you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all of your life“. That MONEYBALL, one of the best movies of the year, has so much new to say about the sport of baseball is the amazing thing.

Overall Rating: 5 out of 5 stars