Moneyball
3 1/2 stars (out of 4)
Rated: PG
Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in Oscar-pitching roles, gloriously gets baseball’s essential contest: instinct vs. intellect.
Players are selected by appearances and hunches, yet are judged by numbers and dollars. The star batter can turn out to be a .200 hitter and financial liability.
Every major team fantasizes about winning the World Series. The reality is that richer clubs like the New York Yankees have about four times the salary pot of poorer ones like the Oakland Athletics, and can afford most of the best players.
Moneyball reverses the instinct vs. intellect order in its transition from page to screen. It takes a thoughtful and factual 2003 bestseller by Michael Lewis and turns it into an emotional and dramatic film by Bennett Miller (Capote).
He is assisted by a home-run screenplay by Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network).
This is how it should be. Lewis’s book, as good as it was, really was “inside baseball.” The minutiae-filled account told of how Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, reversed his team’s fortunes in 2002 by choosing players on the basis of their deeply analyzed playing statistics, rather than what a scout thought they could do.
For a game as steeped in voodoo and tradition as baseball, this was tantamount to treason, best expressed in the film by veteran scout Grady (Ken Medlock) to Pitt’s Beane: “You’re discounting what scouts have done for 150 years!”
To which Beane bluntly rejoins: “Adapt or die.”
Beane aims to “turn the odds on the casino” with the controversial theories of Bill James, a factory worker turned baseball statistician who believes computer-parsed stats — a controversial process called sabermetrics — can reveal hidden talents.
He teams with Peter Brand (Hill), a 25-year-old Harvard economics grad and James believer, who crunches the numbers that fuel Oakland’s unconventional appointments.
They couldn’t be a less likely duo: the tobacco-chewing and still-athletic Beane, teamed with the ascetic and portly Brand, who would rather be with his precious iMac than a girl.
Pitt and Hill make Beane and Brand seem like the year’s most intriguing couple, bringing deep shades of humour and pathos to their characters that help make Moneyball more than just another sports or baseball movie.
Together they take on not only baseball’s monolithic culture but also the threatened alpha dogs who fiercely defend their turf. Guys like the A’s field manager Art Howe, wonderfully played with barely contained rage by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who scorns Beane’s sabermetrics experiment.
Moneyball fairly reeks of spilled testosterone, although two women make their presences grandly felt: Robin Wright as Beane’s patient ex-wife; and newcomer Kerris Dorsey as his guitar-strumming young daughter Casey, who just wants her dad to be happy.
“Just enjoy the show!” she warbles, in a heartwarming tune that becomes Moneyball’s anthem, and that’s all the urging you need to take you out to this ball game.
Peter Howell is a syndicated movie critic for the Toronto Star.