Moneyball sounds boring. With the current big screen offerings, one might feel more inclined to cry as Joseph Gordon-Levitt is diagnosed with cancer and laugh as Seth Rogan says funny things about it. But Moneyball? It’s a movie that follows Billy Beane, some washed-up baseball player-turned-general manager for the Oakland A’s, and how he starts using statistics to recruit players, which makes some people angry and/or annoyed. It sounds boring.
This is a sports movie without actually being a sports movie. There is no raucous, inspired baseball-loving fandom, no transforming sense of team spirit and stick-to-itiveness and no rah-rah, really. As the box office demonstrates, people would rather see Hugh Jackman build a boxing robot, or Ryan Gosling learn painfully obvious things about dirty politics while looking awesome in a suit.
And yet, Moneyball is one of those refreshing films that has the power to remind scores of moviegoing drones, used to being spoon-fed formulaic drivel, that almost anything can make a good story if presented in the right way.
Moneyball is presented in the right way.
At its bare bones, the movie is about general manager Billy Beane and the world he inhabits. When Billy employs recent Yale grad Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill, the ambitious young man powers through computational statistics to shake up the heart-and-soul gentlemans club of player recruiting. Gut feelings and character assessment are shouldered out of Oakland’s team building in favor of Brand’s cold hard numbers, a process decried loudly and publicly by the baseball fundamentalists and good-ole-boys.
As an unorthodox, computer-crafted assembly of new Oakland Athletics players carries the team through a tumultuous season, sportscasters predict Billy’s failure; the slow reveal of the A’s fate is interspersed with saturated scenes of Billy as a young man, passing up a Stanford scholarship to play professional baseball and failing grandly. All the while, Billy’s astute, musically inclined ten-year-old daughter worries about her dad’s dubious employment status as his name is besmeared on the Internet.
This plotline, inherently capable of falling flat, is infused with joie de vivre by a strong and careful cast.
The iconic, obnoxiously perfect-faced Brad Pitt is absent from Moneyball. He becomes smirking, intense, back-talking Billy Beane, in the way all actors are supposed to embody the roles they play, but so rarely do. Beane, with his nervous tics and impatient mannerisms, listens to radio announcements of his team’s baseball games because he is too superstitious to ever watch his team play live. He has the buttery charm and quietly contained energy of a highly effective executive, standing at his desk and trading players over a slew of abrupt phone calls without ever missing a beat.
The supporting cast, just as strong as the leading man, is a peripheral joy. Chris Pratt, of Parks and Recreation, brings a spark of his goofy affability from Pawnee, Indiana to the Oakland Coliseum. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a quietly obstinate manager whose ideological scuffles with Billy highlight the tension within the upper echelons of the baseball administrative hierarchy. And Jonah Hill as Peter Brand, uncharacteristically somber and serious, is representative of well-educated young professionals straddling the generational line between tradition and innovation.
Beyond exemplary acting, one of Moneyball’s signature strengths lies in its sleek script, co-written by The Social Network’s Aaron Sorkin. Both stories are loosely adapted from critically-acclaimed non-fiction; both touch upon the humanistic blessing/curse dichotomy of technological revolution; both are bolstered by surefire dialogue and easy, clever humor. And despite the occasional too-long scene or extraneous sermon, both are good — Oscar good.
Moneyball makes you care. The scenes actually involving baseball, which are fewer than expected, are rife with well-executed tension and triumph. Viewers are inclined to feel sympathy for players shuffled in and out of the roster like cards in a child’s trading deck. And, as Billy topples water coolers and chucks chairs across rooms, we adopt his frenzied desire—no, need— to win, to win it all. For someone who could not have cared less about baseball, Moneyball changed my outlook on the sport.
Long story short: Moneyball is not boring—far from it. Its success is in the scene. Billy turning his radio on and off, on and off, while sitting alone in the A’s’ dark stadium amidst a sea of empty seats, is enough to envelop the audience in the enormity of professional baseball—with all of its variables of talent and money and luck tangled up in the livelihoods of thousands and the spirit of millions.
