Moneyball

Bennett Miller transforms Michael Lewis's nonfiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), into one of the finest docudramas to hit the cinema in many years. Lewis's book chronicles the Oakland Athletics' 2002 season and how Billy Beane, the team’s general manager, used an analytical, empirical, and statistical or sabermetric approach to compete with opposing teams with vast financial resources. For the film, Miller collaborates with two of contemporary cinema’s greatest screenwriters: Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List, Searching for Bobby Fischer, A Civil Action) and Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, Charlie Wilson's War, TV’s The West Wing). Together they fashion a compelling dramatic narrative while sticking close to the real-life facts and avoiding nearly all of the potential pitfalls of the often hackneyed and contrived docudrama formulas.

Like the previous year’s The Social Network—which was also written by Aaron Sorkin and based on a true story—Moneyball is a chilly, cerebral film that still manages to work as an exciting, funny, and engrossing entertainment. Chilly and cerebral are odd tones for a sports movie, but Moneyball isn’t a traditional baseball picture like The Natural, Bull Durham, or Major League. Also like The Social Network, it’s about a business and the man at the head of that business. Brad Pitt plays Beane who, against all conventional wisdom, turned the decades-old business practices of America’s national pastime on their heads by assembling a winning team from undervalued players that most other general managers and scouts dismissed. Pitt, who has grown into such an exceptional actor over the past decade, gives a career-high performance in this role. Sorkin and Zaillian's deft script provides the audience with just enough insight into Beane’s past as a failed ballplayer to contextualize what makes him different from other team managers and clearly define what the stakes are for him during this critical juncture in his life. They also give us perspective into his personal story through scenes with his ex-wife Sharon (Robin Wright) and his teenage daughter Casey (Kerris Dorsey). Pitt’s intelligence shines in every moment of this picture. His Billy Bean is cocky and aggressive at work, despite the fact that he’s full of doubt and near the end of his rope; and strong, warm, and unthreatening when he’s with his family, despite his knowledge that losing his job could seriously compromise his relationship with his daughter. Pitt conveys what’s going on inside his character’s head through varying degrees of external physicality: calm, cool, and reassuring in some scenes, constantly pacing, eating, and chewing tobacco in others.

The filmmakers brilliantly communicate the intricacies of the statistical formulas Beane used in 2002 to win games and set records, as well as illustrate how little faith everyone around him had in this system, through his relationships with coworkers. Like Zaillian's script for Shindler’s List, Moneyball makes oblique concepts and complex history palpable and jaunty through a kind of buddy-picture structure. Jonah Hill plays Beane’s assistant Peter Brand, a composite character based mostly on the Athletics' Assistant General Manager Paul DePodesta—who served as a consultant for the film. Brand, a graduate of Yale economics, teaches Beane about statistics and becomes his right-hand (and left-brain) man at the organization. The two then face off against the scouts, owners, fans, and the A’s manager Art Howe, who dislikes Beane and considers his system total folly. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Howe, who is the closest thing this movie has to an antagonist, but Hoffman and the screenwriters never allow this character to devolve into a simplistic villain. Howe is presented as a smart, talented man in a difficult situation not dissimilar to Beane’s. The picture’s dramatic tension comes from the almost universal resistance and seemingly insurmountable odds Beane and Brand face as they implement their strategy. 

There is more art-of-the-deal than love-of-the-game in Moneyball. Some of the most dynamic and exciting scenes are Sorkinesque stagings of Beane fast-talking, working the phones, and demonstrating his intelligence via articulate and charismatic grandstanding. By contrast, Miller and cinematographer Wally Pfister (Memento, The Italian Job, The Dark Knight) shoot the actual baseball sequences in a sombre, contemplative style—these are the darkest and moodiest major league sports sequences you’ll ever see in a Hollywood sports picture. Yet this cool, cerebral film, which highlights statistical and business dimensions of our nation’s pastime, still manages to showcase the undeniable importance of luck, superstition, and passion in the game of baseball. These emotional and non-logical aspects are conveyed in part by the carefully selected scenes of play included in the picture—most  significantly a sequence in which the A’s attempt to break the league record for most consecutive wins in a season—and through the restrained but involving ways the personalities of the individual player characters are developed. The actors playing the real-life members of the 2003 team (Chris Pratt, Casey Bond, Stephen Bishop, Royce Clayton, Nick Porrazzo, Scott Hatteberg, and others) are each ideally suited to their roles, and the scenes the filmmakers create for them never reduce them to two-dimensional representations for narrative or thematic ideas. These players feel like real people in a real situation. It is this attention to personal details, motivations, and emotions—in both the major and minor players in the story—that makes Moneyball more than just a solid sports picture and an above-average docudrama. Miller, Zaillian, Sorkin, Pitt, and the rest of the cast create a deeply involving, first-rate character study from a well-researched piece of long-form journalism.