Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, a former professional baseball player turned General Manager for the Oakland Athletics, a team with high aspirations and a low budget to recruit star players. Beane fortuitously stumbles upon Peter Brand, a former Yale economics major, who analyzes players based on math, much to the dismay of the experienced scouts and the manager, who is a formidable obstacle to the implementation of the plan. Will Beane’s untraditional approach work?
Why would I, a vocal sports atheist and renown detractor of Pitt’s talents watch Moneyball? I am a Michael Lewis fan, who wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which was adapted into this film and feel as if I read an excerpt of this book in The New Yorker because there is no other reason to explain why I am familiar with sabermetrics. I read and enjoyed Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street and The Money Culture. I will probably read the book, and I always hate the movie if I watch it after reading the book. Considering how much I hate sports and am not into Pitt as an actor, I wanted to give the film as much of an enjoyment advantage when I watched it. Also Lewis’ books have a superb record of becoming great film adaptations: The Big Short and The Blind Side.
In addition, I love the dearly departed Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays the manager, Art Howe. I plan to watch all of Hoffman’s films, a sadly finite number, and I probably only need two hands to count how many more are still in reserve. He was one of the greatest American actors ever, and I would watch him in a movie about nails on a chalkboard. He is that good.
Because Moneyball is based on a true story, it appealed to my sports loving mom, who normally hates profanity, but did not seem to notice it in this film probably because a locker room was literally nearby. We both watched it New Year’s Eve 2020 before the festivities started airing on television and probably walked away mildly entertained, but largely untouched emotionally or intellectually.
If The Big Short distilled Lewis’ prose to its most entertaining essence without sacrificing his scope and The Blind Side just favored the human interest portion of his story, then Moneyball fell somewhere in between. A friend accurately pegged my issue with the movie, “The baseball got in the way of the math,” but if you are my polar opposite and came for the baseball then you may be disappointed because it follows none of the emotional beats that most sports films follow and like Beane, stays away from the field as much as possible. If it was Field of Dreams, you would be an insomniac. The final act got a little confusing for me when the film depicted some historical moments, and I could not tell without listening to the announcer if the As were doing well or not. The film reaches its most avant garde as it gradually dissolves the action of the field until there is nothing there as if the entire game is a specter that haunts Beane or only resides in his imagination.
Bennett Miller directed Moneyball. Unintentionally I have seen all his feature films: The Cruise, Capote and Foxcatcher. Because I was not doing it consciously, I was not paying attention to whether or not he has a characteristic style, but we definitely have similar tastes when it comes to subject matter that interests us. He is more interested in what happens behind the scenes than on the stage, the movers and shakers that make everything happen. I suspect that this film is so popular because Pitt and Jonah Hill, who plays Brand, a composite character, are the intellectuals in this film, a hot guy and a comedian, a drama odd couple that actually have more in common beneath the veneer.
While the flashbacks were initially confusing because Reed Thompson who plays younger Billy Beane looks nothing like Pitt, not even similar bone structure, it ultimately works in the narrative because the film depicts Billy as a nerd in jock’s clothing. If you are bitter about your life choices when you deferred to conventional wisdom, and you could have gone to Stanford, you may let your jock side take a back seat and let your nerd flag fly. If you are not paying attention to the story, then Pitt’s Billy suits the conventional Hollywood archetype of an iconoclast, the protagonist rebel. He is young and vibrant like his ideas in contrast to his table of scouts. He broods and is quite emotional. His dialogue has an impatient swagger that is sick of diplomacy and has its own rhythm. He goes to the beat of his own drummer, and everyone must adjust to his cadence even if it veers into abusive if you are looking at the character through real world lens, i.e. how would you feel if your boss treated you like that, but can be brushed off as passionate and inspirational if you just look at it as a movie. No wonder Quentin Tarantino hired Pitt to drive around for so long in Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. While the manner of driving conveys a completely different psychological state, a man dogged with a lifetime of frustration, Tarantino probably figured that if people lauded Pitt for two hours and thirteen minutes of being a modern-day Sisyphus, then his more sensational narrative would definitely captivate audiences.
I would have preferred if Moneyball was tighter. By the end, it felt as if the film was running on fumes, and my mom was just done. The film correctly does not end on a triumphant note, but continues the vein of exasperation at never completely getting vindicated in the stadium. Once the clash of personalities subsides, the film loses all momentum, which suggests that perhaps the film should have embraced its nerdy side more because it never lost momentum when it used archival and stock footage to visually represent its statistical side. It gets stuck in neutral when the film is solely a character study.
As much as I enjoy films like The Big Short and Moneyball, I would be lying if I did not confess that these movies leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Billy gets so much fuel from simply getting into Stanford while women and people of color who actually went to an Ivy League college have to hide their light under a bushel once they get a foot in the door otherwise such an achievement is seen as a personal challenge to take them down a peg. We do not get an amused Suzanne who does not mind if we ask her to do her job in less than dulcet, self-deprecating tones. Billy was right because the numbers do not lie, but before that moment, he was failing up.
I will never get over the moment when the numbers were on my side. I, a double Harvard grad—not that it should matter after decades in the workplace (it is as if you are talking about your great love from high school), was achieving a historical high rate for my employer then rebuked because I was not paid to think or innovate, I was paid to be their puppet and execute things the way that they instructed even if it benefitted them and put no extra burden or task on anyone but myself. It is about the power to put people in their place. People do not like to think logically. These kind of movies are just as dangerous as rom coms. People would rather feel powerful than perform objectively better otherwise bias would not exist. It is not financially rewarding.
I liked Moneyball, but it was ultimately just entertaining, not memorable and ultimately uneven and too long to stick the landing. If you like Pitt, it is a must see film. If you want to learn more about the inner workings of the executive side of a baseball team, definitely check it out, but if you are looking for the traditional, uplifting, inspiring sports film, you will be disappointed, and if you are looking to geek out, the film falls short.
