Moneyball
Regal, October 3, 2011
Movie #72 for 2011
The Oakland Athletics are a poor major league baseball club. In 2001 they had a really good season, so inevitably, their star players were poached to richer teams, leaving the A’s gutted. Billy Beane, the general manager, realized that the traditional methods of scouting new players weren’t going to cut it, so he hired a statistician (played by a nicely understated JONAH HILL) to build a winning team from the rejects and non-starters than no one else has noticed. They have a remarkable season, and now they have a movie about it. A sports underdog movie? Surely you jest!
But Moneyball is not Remember the Titans But With Baseball and, amazingly, it isn’t a Kevin Costner movie (like all of them since Major League - Field of Dreams, For the Love of the Game, Bull Durham). What it is is less about the scoreboard of the climactic game, and more about what brought the characters there, and the fallout afterwards. This, to me, is waaaay more interesting.
The influence of Friday Night Lights is clear which is always going to go over well with me. Which is to say that the characters are a little tortured, the camera is a little floaty and the sports sections are well done and filled with tension. There’s even some Explosions in the Sky in the soundtrack.
I did struggle with a couple of elements, though. The way that Billy Beane (BRAD PITT, pictured) is hero-worshipped is troubling. He’s clearly a grade-A asshole (especially to the team’s coach, played by PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN) but played by Pitt, he’s still a good guy somehow. They could have been a little braver about that - we can respect a guy for his vision, without also having to like him. Can’t we?
Also, the film’s most effecting scenes were the reenactments of the A’s astounding season. I read that Steven Soderberg was the film’s original director, and that he had envisioned it - even began shooting it - as a documentary style dramatisation with the players all playing themselves and with talking heads explaining much of what was going on. Although I liked this version by BENNETT MILLER (Capote) well enough, I really, really want to see what Soderberg’s would have looked like.
In the end, Moneyball turned out to be not nearly as good a docu-drama as the one I imagine Soderberg would have made, not nearly as good an American sport movie as Friday Night Lights, and not nearly as good a sports general manager movie as The Damned United. But still, a pretty decent American sports general manager not-quite-docu-drama movie (that doesn’t star Kevin Costner).
