“Moneyball” is a baseball movie but you need not be a baseball fan to enjoy it. The intricacy of Brad Pitt’s performance, the way his mind works, his various quirks and ticks are so intriguing that he could be talking about stocks, CIA assassinations or romancing a romantic comedy leading lady and you would be equally engaged.
In “Moneyball” Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s. In 2001 the A’s had been successful playing and managing baseball the way everybody else did. Unfortunately, the economy has begun to weigh on the team, and on Billy in particular. The team’s three marquee players are leaving for big contracts from richer teams that the A’s can’t hope to match.
Billy must find a way to win with the meager amount of money he has. To do that, Billy buys the contract of Peter Brand away from the Cleveland Indians. Peter is a Harvard grad with a degree in Economics. Peter is also a student of Bill James, an amateur statistician who created a controversial metric for measuring the value of players.
Baseball insiders, old school scouts and the like, despise Bill James and if Billy weren’t so far in the hole he might tend to agree. Under the circumstances however, Billy opens up to Peter’s unconventional ideas for evaluating players and together they begin the process of changing the way the A’s do business.
The meat of Moneyball is watching Brad Pitt’s Billy weather the storm of controversy and criticism that accompanies his embracing a new way of assembling a baseball team. In this, there are pleasures for both baseball fans and non-fans. For fans, the authenticity of Moneyball in the use of real player names, real trade scenarios and game footage is a treat for the baseball dense memory.
For non-fans, director Bennett Miller and screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin have crafted something very reminiscent of The Social Network, a study of a fascinating character in a unique setting filled with terrific dialogue and rendered in a way that makes minutia and jargon fashionable and easy to follow.
You don’t need a crash course in Sabermetrics to get that Billy Beane operates in a high pressure environment or that his temper occasionally gets the best of him. Brad Pitt makes Beane so compelling that no matter what he’s doing you can’t take your eyes off of him. It’s a quality Pitt has always had but it’s especially compelling here for reasons that really need to be seen to understand.
Jonah Hill plays Peter, a composite of several real life computer nerds who have since Billy Beane opened the door to them, invaded front offices all across baseball. Hill portrays Peter as a modest guy who happens to have a unique idea and the ear of someone in power. This is Jonah Hill at his least manic and the role suits him.
You can sense several moments where Jonah Hill would normally riff, as he did in “Superbad,” but stops himself because it doesn’t fit in this role. It’s a pleasure to watch Hill squirm into this role until he finds a comfortable space; he uses what may be real discomfort opposite Pitt to create Peter and Billy’s boss-underling hesitant friendship.
Given the thankless role of A’s manager Art Howe, Phillip Seymour Hoffman picks his spots to shine. Strangely, I was reminded of Hoffman’s role in “The Big Lebowski” where his character used minor vocal inflections or physical cues as much as his dialogue to create his character. Hoffman’s Howe is an obstinate ass but you can see a reasonable, if completely frustrated, man behind his grumpiness. There is a genuine concern that underlines Howe’s motivations in his war with Billy Beane and that concern is not made plain in dialogue as much as in Hoffman’s glowering presence.
There is one truly inside baseball moment that only students of baseball history will get. The film’s baseball climax features an historic baseball showdown between the poster player for Sabermetrics, Scott Hattieberg (Chris Pratt), and pitcher Jason Grimsley who, alongside Jose Canseco, stood at the epicenter of baseball’s steroid era.
“Moneyball” has both a baseball climax and a character climax and both are exhilarating in unique ways. Director Bennett Miller’s framing of the baseball and character moments of “Moneyball” allows the film to grow beyond being ‘just a sports movie’ and into a brilliant movie that happens to be set within the sports world.
Brad Pitt gives the performance of the year in “Moneyball” and I will be surprised if he is not clutching an Oscar statue come February. “Moneyball ” is just that good.