Moneyball

Moneyball
Genre: Sports Drama
Director: Bennett Miller
Stars: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Rating: ★★★☆ (3.5/4)

Moneyball was directed by Bennett Miller who directed the 2005 drama Capote, which still remains as one of my favorite biographical dramas due to the powerful emotion and the performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman. This is, again, a biographical drama, and it, again, has Philip Seymour Hoffman, but that's about it for the similarities between the two movies.

Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, is a former baseball player the general manager for the Oakland Athletics, a baseball team with an extremely limited payroll. He struggles with both trying to make a working team with what he is afforded, and his personal problems such as his recent divorce. On a trip to Cleveland, he meets Yale graduate Peter Brand, who interests Beane with his unique mindset when it comes to players. He comes up with an ideology that is more focused on scoring rather than assembling a good team in the conventional sense. This leads to a radical change in the team, much to the dismay of the owner, the scouts and the team manager, Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The film is about baseball in terms of plot, but not really in terms of spirit. The film does not attempt to show passion for the sport or love of the game, even the central character does not watch the games. In spirit, this is really a film about business; a film that is based more on the unseen aspect of baseball. The characters on this film have the same mindset as those in writer Atticus Ross' other film The Social Network, to innovate. Whether or not they succeed it dependent on their success in the sport which is about as far as fire for the game is going to go.

Moneyball showcases some great performances from the film's central characters. Brad Pitt has already achieved some success this awards season thanks to his great performance as Billy, who he portrays with humor and bluntness. Jonah Hill's performance is understated yet very good, the whole dork persona that he portrays so often is channeled and made dramatic; and successfully if I might add. The rest of the supporting cast adds well to the film also.

The rest of his companions don't take the new strategies warmly. Beane starts to get players solely on On-Base-Percentage; those of which were calculated by Brand. They go against the current flow of the sport's mindset by disregarding normally important factors such as age, health, experience and even batting ability and instead those who can simply get on base. In one particular scene, Brand expresses his admiration for the baseball player who has the second most walks in the league. That further shows the significance of pure numbers in the movie's context.

The movie is ruthless; in a scene Beane says that he does not go to games in order to fire people without hesitation. He prefers to keep an emotional distance to those involved so he can break them off quickly. Brand, a man of statistics, finds this particularly difficult to do. For a ruthless and cold movie however, it still manages to be touching. We actually start to care about Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. Even those who know absolutely nothing about baseball will start to care about its coldest aspect. Quite admirable indeed.

I'll add this: the movie is funny. Much of this humor can be attributed to Brad Pitt. The movie is not a comedy though, it isn't comedic in the slightest sense. It's just funny. "The problem is there are rich teams, and there are poor teams. And then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us."