Moneyball Review

Moneyball should be a much better movie than it actually is. An inside baseball account of, well, a true baseball story, the picture has got all the talent you could ask for and some truly inspired moments. And yet, it loses steam at the seventh-inning stretch. (Yeah, baseball metaphors are happening today…)

Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's. Despite being constrained by a meager (by Major League Baseball's standards) payroll, his team has just come so close to winning it all when we first meet Beane -- and yet so far. As the season ends, he's losing his three most valuable players to teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox. In other words, the guys with the deep pockets.

The team's owners won't give Beane any more money, and yet he's got to figure out how he can rebuild his roster to Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon (circa 2002) greatness. And that's when he accidentally stumbles upon Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a chubby kid out of Yale with an economics degree and a very different way of looking at the sport. Where the Red Sox are dazzled by a Johnny Damon type and throw $7 million his way to nab him, Brand sees such a move as a loss. He has a knack for picking players, thanks to some computer statistics analysis voodoo called sabermetrics, that cost a twentieth of that but whose combined output can match that of any star.

Watch the trailer for Moneyball.

This new mindset, fully embraced by Beane, does not sit well with the seasoned scouts who are meant to advise him on how to roster up. What results is, among other things, an examination of the difference between trusting your gut reaction versus the hard numbers. What do you feel, and what really makes sense?

Beane has apparently struggled with this very notion for many years, ever since his perfect life as the ultimate athlete in high school -- he was topnotch in every position in baseball -- led to being a first-round Major League draft pick… as well as major league hopes and dreams too. Hopes that were subsequently dashed when, for whatever reason, he just couldn't cut it in the Majors. See, Beane has already tried playing by Baseball's rules. Now he wants to rewrite those rules.

Pitt and Hill together are like Kirk and Spock -- total opposites who somehow complete one another. Their moments together are some of the highlights of the film, as during the scene involving a protracted, multi-party trade that the two are trying to cook up over the phone with various other teams. The sequence is hilarious, enlightening and confusing all at once, and it really gives the impression that these two guys have become partners and friends despite their vast differences.


But other players in the film, on and off the field, don't fare so well. Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the team's manager Art Howe, plays his antagonistic character as one-note. Robin Wright shows up for about five minutes as Beane's ex-wife (though honestly, it is refreshing that the filmmakers don't feel the need to cram a love story into the film). And the players who are drafted to the team and who we are apparently meant to care about are more or less dropped from the story in the final act. You expect more from a script by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian.

Whereas Moneyball's story is all about thinking outside the box, the approach of director Bennett Miller (Capote) becomes increasingly inside the box, specifically the well-worn sports movie variety. It's all here: The losing team that, improbably, starts winning. The haters proved wrong. The big game. And so on. You've seen a lot of this movie before.

Miller does step out from the cliche dugout from time to time to take a stylistic bow, as with the recurring beat involving Beane's precocious young daughter and her uncanny ability with a guitar and a tune -- a little ditty that becomes dad's own personal song by the end of the film, and an emotionally affecting one at that. It's a shame that the movie as a whole isn't as effective in this regard.

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