xavierpop's posterous http://xavierpop.posterous.com Most recent posts at xavierpop's posterous posterous.com Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:52:23 -0700 @MovieJay's Review of Moneyball http://xavierpop.posterous.com/moviejays-review-of-moneyball http://xavierpop.posterous.com/moviejays-review-of-moneyball

Heading into the 2002 season, Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics found themselves minus three star players from their previous season. One in which they cracked the elusive 100-win barrier but ended up losing a heartbreaking 5-game series to the Yankees in the first round of the playoffs to end their season early.

The A's had a payroll of just under $40 million, roughly three times less than that of the Yankees, in a sport where the big market teams essentially pilfer great players from the smaller market ones. Unlike the NBA or the NFL, where revenues are pooled and teams have an equal shot at being competitive, Major League Baseball still goes by the old formula of every-man-for-himself.

It is this challenge of lopsidedness and the frustration that comes from it that the movie is about. We see this very well illustrated early on through a sports-talk radio announcer as he laments how the A's are essentially a farm system for teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. It is this same tension that we see in Billy Beane, the A's General Manager and a former player himself as he is a man who simply hates, hates, hates losing.

Restless and lonely, Brad Pitt plays Beane as a man with constant dissatisfaction within himself. He wheels and deals, signs new players, works the phones with other GM's around the league, dotes on his daughter from his failed marriage, and drives around aimlessly during games while sporadically checking the radio to hear updates driven with an almost obsessive focus.

In the off-season heading into 2002, it is made clear to Beane by the A's owner that they'll have to try to compete again using imagination and creativity since the payroll simply won't budge from where it's at, which is in the basement. On a trip to Cleveland to meet with Indians management, we meet Peter Brand, an assistant in that organization who appears to be one of the key people in the room who shoots down a trade that Beane and the Indians GM are working out. This infuriates Beane and it leads to a scene between the two men in an underground parking lot where Brand explains the fallacies of the old scouting system. Beane appreciates Brand's honesty which results in him buying him from the Indians to work as his assistant-GM in Oakland.

Moneyball isn't so much a baseball movie as it is a movie about the business of baseball. What we learn about sabermetrics, a computer-generated analysis that is used to target undervalued players who are perhaps better than their overall numbers might suggest, is not as important as the fact that it is now commonly used by all professional sports teams. Indeed, the best the movie can do is give us entertaining cross-cuts and pans of a multitude of stats, figures and player names, but what is important is how the characters feel about the technology.

The great success of Moneyball, a drama that is surprisingly touching and funny, lies in the screenplay by Steve Zailian (Schindler's List, Searching For Bobby Fischer) and Aaron Sorkin (the West Wing, the Social Network). They use observation and character to thrust the action forward instead of artificial plot requirements we have become used to in sports movies that too often depend on the "big game" or the "tournament" for tension. We meet a few of the players on the A's squad, but the focus is almost entirely on the backroom dealings, although there is one sequence in the second half of the pic detailing the American League record the A's set by winning 20 games in a row that is among the best and purely entertaining sequences of it's kind in sports movies as it splices real footage together with action from the movie. There are also a couple of quiet and sad scenes involving players who are traded or sent down to the minors that are written very well and make the athletes into human commodities who we actually feel for.

Moneyball is smarter and ultimately more engaging than most other sports films because it does a wonderful job at bringing empathy to all sides. From the GM and his assistant, (played with dry understatement by Jonah Hill, in his best performance to date), to the old-time scouts who fear the new system, to the uncompromising and stalwart A's manager Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a guy who will manage his team the best way he sees fit. The empathy given to Hoffman and the scouts elevates this movie as one of the year's best because they aren't made out to be foils but are real people with real concerns and doubts about an unproven system based on computer technology.

Brad Pitt does a great job of suggesting restlessness in almost every scene as he moves forward with uncertainty about how things will turn out for the team and for himself. The movie ends perfectly with an interplay between him and Hill in some of their more private moments which are existential and melancholy and are truly refreshing to behold in a movie about sports.

Thoughtful, funny, and an excellent entertainment, Moneyball is the best movie of it's kind since Friday Night Lights.

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