MONEYBALL: Beane Counter

This review was requested by Don Rebel. Many thanks to Don for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Bennett Miller
Writers: Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, Reed Diamond, Brent Jennings
Runtime: 133 mins.
2011

It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life.
-Mickey Mantle

Moneyball is not the best baseball movie out there, but it may be the most interesting. That's because it's not about a player, a team, an important game, a magical season, or a comeback victory-- though it contains those elements. Moneyball is about an idea.

The film follows the true story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), General Manager of the Oakland A's, and picks up in the final hour of their 2001 season. Against all odds the A's have made it to the American League Divisional Series against the New York Yankees in a classic story of David vs. Goliath. Only, Goliath wins. We learn in short order that the magical season the A's cobbled together with luck, skill, and spunk, is not destined to be repeated. All of their rising stars (Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, Jason Isringhausen) will be unceremoniously snatched up by teams that can afford their rising star paychecks. In the midst of this prologue's suffocating sense of deflation and disappointment, we see the all-important insert card: 

$114,457,768 vs. $39,722,689

These are the budgets of the respective teams, and their prominence in the prologue signals to us the themes that the film will insist upon over and over again: it all comes down to money, and baseball is an unfair game.

This is where Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) enters the story. While Beane is surrounded by old baseball men who keep going around the table offering the same tired old mantras about rebuilding, Brand has something different to say. He is the bearer of an idea.

The way everyone thinks about baseball is fundamentally broken. Rather than relying on the oldheads' admixture of experience, intuition, and bias, there is a way to cut through all that noise and build a team based on metrics that achieve one simple goal: wins. This method of team analysis and construction is known as "sabermetrics," and is almost entirely focused on bringing together a gaggle of neglected players who are able to get on base, and therefore score more runs, and therefore win more games. While the old guard advisors are talking about players who have "a beautiful swing" or "a baseball body," Brand points at a player like Kevin Youkilis and characterizes him as the Greek god of walks who his former boss refused to acquire because he "waddles like a duck."

The film follows the arc of this idea through obscurity, to resistance, to growing pains, to inexplicable success, to disappointment and dismissal, and finally begrudging and limited acceptance. In many ways the film is about the hostility of any long-legacied culture to new and challenging ideas.

It would be easy to mistake this as a movie about Billy Beane, because the movie hews so close to his perspective. Yet it's better to consider that Beane's role in the movie is to provide us an angle of understanding on the idea and the idea's aforementioned arc. Beane himself is not exceptionally interesting; he's just a man seething with caked up years of toxic rage, a man who is able to put his faith entirely in this radical idea because of the ways that traditional baseball thinking failed him in his youth. His own tragic puncturing of potential is what keeps him from being mired in the system like everyone else, a system steeped in history and decay.*

*This history and decay is gestured to early in the film when Beane sits in a Cleveland Indians waiting room ominously dominated by the grossly offensive "Chief Wahoo" logo, a white supremacist iconography that it took until this year to replace.

Despite being something of a false protagonist, Beane is charismatically performed by Pitt. He's using his classic Brad Pitt stable of tricks: smile knowingly, stare longingly, shove fistfuls of finger food in his face. It's a testament to Bennett Miller's directing that he's dialed this bag of tricks down to exactly the right level, letting the procedural narrative take center stage while also maintaining a lowkey sense of humor about it all. His pairing with Jonah Hill works extremely well to keep all the shop talk exciting and fresh, and the entire cast (from a babyfaced way-out-of-his-league Chris Pratt to wonderfully stony head coach Philip Seymour Hoffman) picks up on this energy. The one-liners sneak up on you. One of the funniest moments of the film sees Beane and Ron Washington (Brent Jennings) recruiting a stymied Scott Hatteburg (Chris Pratt) to play 1st Base, a position he's never even practiced. "It's not that hard, Scott. Tell him Wash." "It's incredibly hard."

What Pitt really brings to the table is a growing willingness to be vulnerable with his team. This changing relationship is about moving past trauma by allowing oneself to hurt when things get hard. Although this gradual revelation is not the central pivot of the movie, it is crucially important because it shows us that even the greatest idea in the world is completely useless without the interpersonal element, because that's what gets the idea across. That's what makes it human.

This is shown in Beane's quiet moments of reflection sprinkled throughout, and it's shown in scenes like the terrific but not terribly flashy tracking shot through the A's locker room in which Beane checks in with the entire team in one fell swoop. As a complement to the disciplined acting, the cinematography of Moneyball is tight. The way that the editing interfaces stock footage of actual players with shots of actors on the field makes this quasi-fictional exploration feel seamless. To add some extra depth to it all, Bennett Miller skillfully picks isolated moments to depart from the realism of the rest of the film. In these moments the baseball diamond becomes abstracted and we catch the gestures, the swings, the sounds, the tableaus of the game in a much more subjective register. These moments transcend the rest of the film and touch upon the phrase Billy Beane often repeats to himself.

It's hard not to be romantic about baseball.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS