Welcome to another episode
Lights....Camera....Popcorn!
Today's review is
Moneyball.
Directed by Bennett Miller.
Written by Aaron Sorkin & Steve Zaillian.
Screen Story by Stan Chervin
Based on the book
"Moneyball : The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" written by Michael Lewis.
Review
#140
MPAA Rating:
PG-13 for some strong language.
Runtime: 133 min
Cast
Brad Pitt ... Billy Beane
Jonah Hill ... Peter Brand
Philip Seymour Hoffman ... Art Howe
Robin Wright ... Sharon
Nick Searcy ... Matt Keough
Ken Medlock ...Grady Fuson
The Oakland A's
Chris Pratt ... Scott Hatteberg
Stephen Bishop ... David Justice
Brent Jennings ... Ron Washington
Casey Bond ... Chad Bradford
Nick Porrazzo ... Jeremy Giambi
Derrin Ebert ... Mike Magnante
Miguel Mendoza ... Ricardo Rincon
Adrian Bellani ... Carlos Peña
Art Ortiz ... Eric Chavez
Royce Clayton ... Miguel Tejada
Baseball movies. We've all seen em. Some of us
LOVE em. Some of us don't. I'm not sure what it is but there's just something about Hollywood putting the national pastime on film that just inspires so much emotion on both the positive and negative side. And just like any other sports genre film, baseball movies have gone through every possible story angle. From true accounts of the game and it's players. To fictional stories. To comedy and even romance. We all have our personal favorite baseball movies but there are a select few that would be considered the "All Stars" of the genre.
Here they are in no particular order.
Bull Durham
The Natural
Eight Men Out
61*
Pride of The Yankees
Major League
The Bad News Bears (1976)
A League of Their Own
Field of Dreams
For all the success that these movies have had there have been countless failures. Some of them appealed to kids which took the magic of the game away and replaced it with careless hijinks.
Little Big League and
Rookie of The Year instantly come to mind. Or you would get a complete 180 and be subjected to a baseball movie with over the top drama.
Does
The Fan with Wesley Snipes and Robert De Niro ring any bells?
For me, the best kind of baseball film is one that takes us inside the game and shows us parts of it that us mere mortals aren't privy to on an everyday basis.
Moneyball gave the impression that we were going to see exactly that.
So did they? Yes.
Plot
Oakland A's GM Billy Beane is handicapped with the lowest salary constraint in baseball. If he ever wants to win the World Series, Billy must find a competitive advantage. Billy is about to turn baseball on its ear when he uses statistical data to analyze and place value on the players he picks for the team.
The moneyball philosophy was one of the games most controversial and revolutionary concepts since the invention of the baseball glove. For those of you not familiar with what moneyball actually is, allow me to give you a crash course.
Basically, moneyball revolves around the belief that a team with limited resources whether it be talent, finances or both can still compete against the larger market clubs using a specific statistical analysis. That analysis identifies players who don't attract attention in the major statistical categories which for most of us would be batting average, home runs and rbi's. They do however excel in a stat that was somewhat undervalued back when moneyball was new to the game.
That stat is OBP or On Base Percentage. This stat calculates the percentage of times a player gets on base via hit, walk, error, hit by pitch. You could make a case that this stat is more telling of a player's value than their batting average because it details several other ways a player can reach base. This is the basic philosophy that Beane and Brand used to build the A's. They looked at a ton of baseball castoffs that for their career made living's of just getting on base.
When you break it down in the simplest form. If your lineup is full of guys that get on base, common sense would dictate that your team will score a lot of runs. The more runs you score, the more games you will win. Sounds easy enough right? Well tell that to the rest of the league that still believed in the old way a team was constructed which was through scouting and player development.
This is where
Moneyball shined the brightest. It did the best possible job of capturing the culture of the game back then when this new tactic was being ridiculed by everyone outside and inside the A's organization. Beane's new team was met with immediate and relentless resistance. From the scouting and player development department to the manager. It was very entertaining to see how Beane handled the blatant defiance to his new "way" of building a team.
This comes across excellently by the performance of Brad Pitt. He plays Billy Beane with a very stoic yet calculated madness. He knows that his new philosophy isn't the way baseball plays the game. He also knows that the mountain of scrutiny will be big enough to cripple the A's season before pitchers and catchers report for spring training. He also knew that desperate times called for desperate measures. A's ownership was not on board with following the Yankees blueprint of "buying" rings so Beane had no choice but become unconventional while balancing the checkbook. Pitt balanced Beane's real life persona with the Hollywood approach which made it much more entertaining.
The rest of the cast was equally up to the task with Pitt. Primarily Jonah Hill as Brand and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe. Hill was the ying to Pitt's yang. As Beane strolled around presenting moneyball to the rest of the baseball world. Brand was the wizard behind the curtain making sure it actually worked. He was the voice of reason and the brilliant baseball mind that assured that this immensely huge gamble Beane took was going to pay off. Of course playing the villain was Howe who had other motivations to disobey Beane's new take on the team. Hoffman plays Howe with just the right amount of old school baseball man with condescending jerk. This is what made the film so much fun for me. Howe and Beane's back and forth over the lineup and use of the roster force you to see both sides of the argument.
Of course none of this is possible without the solid script penned by Zaillian and of course Mr. Sorkin. It's unclear if this was a tag team effort or if Sorkin wrote the script with a polish by Zaillian or vice versa. Regardless, both men did a fine job presenting a potentially challenging baseball subject to the screen. There were several hurdles to jump before this film could even be considered worth watching. The biggest one being the relevancy of moneyball itself. The concept was implemented close to a decade ago. By now every team employs a version of the moneyball model. So you're dealing with telling a story that most baseball fans are very familiar with. This leads to the second biggest hurdle.
The film's ending.
I won't say what happens to the A's but it doesn't take a genius to figure out how their season went in 2002. This is something that has plagued movies and will continue to do so until the end of time. How do you tell a story where
EVERYONE knows the ending. There's no big "Luke I am your father!" punch in the gut twist here. Because of this issue the film suffers it's biggest "error". After close to 2 hours of a pretty good film.
Moneyball doesn't know how to finish. It felt that there were too many endings which was a shame because a lot of positive momentum was created only to have it come crashing to a halt due to a lack of direction on the film's final shot. This is a byproduct of the change of director before production.
Moneyball was supposed to be helmed by Steven Soderbergh but he left the project. It's funny because the film plays like he never left the chair. If he had stayed on I'm pretty sure he would have ended the film at it's most logical closing point. You'll know what it is when you see it.
The feeling of multiple endings aside,
Moneyball was still a very good, fun and entertaining film that should belong in the lineup of best baseball films.
On the 5 star scale.
Moneyball gets
4.5 stars with a
"Worth Every Penny" recommendation.
That's a wrap for today. Up next is
Killer Elite.
Until Next Episode...."I'll Save You A Seat!"
"D"
