Using stats and numbers-crunching in a way most dismiss as foolish, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) makes the most of his team’s meager budget, putting together a squad of nobodies, future greats, and has-beens who defy the odds and make history.

CRITIQUE

I’ve read the (very good) Michael Lewis book on which Moneyball is based, and I had no idea how anyone could possibly turn it into a movie. It’s often dense with stats and math (two things I absolutely hate), and there doesn’t appear to be much of a narrative line. Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin’s smart, witty script (which fudges some of the facts, but never mind) solves this by shifting the focus to Beane, making the plot the story of an iconoclast out to prove that his way of doing things works.

The sabermetrics (the term coined by Bill James to describe the system of statistical analysis he helped pioneer) gets pushed into the background a bit, largely only brought out in order to provide enough of an understanding as to what Beane is doing and why everyone else thinks he’s lost his damn mind. As a result, the movie’s storytelling is somewhat more conventional than the particulars of this story might lead you to expect, something of a quasi story of redemption, but this is enriched by the intelligence and insight of the script. Moneyball has quite a bit on its mind, and the script makes most of it work. Simply put, this is the best baseball movie I’ve ever seen.

There’s very little actual baseball in the movie, and that’s one of the things I really like about. As much as I enjoy watching baseball, I don’t like watching baseball in movies. Fictionalized baseball is almost always nonsense, contrived and artificial. The Natural is the ne plus ultra of this, cornpone melodrama that starts silly and gets progressively sillier as it goes along, with game play that is laughably overwrought (and don’t even get me started on how it defecates all over its source material).

Real baseball has a quality that fictionalized baseball can’t replicate; watching nine guys dealing with variables while working toward a common goal is infinitely more interesting than watching nine actors dealing with clichés. In a way, what Zaillian, Sorkin, and director Bennett Miller (making his first movie since 2005’s Capote) do in Moneyball is take what real baseball players do on the field and deftly shift it to the backroom dealings most people never get to see. Beane employs a certain set of skills to put together a winning team, using what he has in every way possible, never worrying about what he can’t control, and he adapts and/or switches tactics whenever necessary. It’s a rather brilliant storytelling move.

Beane didn’t invent the system he employs, but he did validate it. So what you have here isn’t the story of a washed-up or underdog player looking to make good, but rather the story of a guy who knows he can’t compete with the big boys in terms of money (the A’s almost knocked the Yankees out of the playoffs in 2001, this despite the fact they had roughly a third of the Yankees’ payroll) but can in terms of mechanics.

Essentially what Beane and assistant general manager Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, whose character is a composite of former A’s assistant GM Paul DePodesta and a few other members of Beane’s staff) do is construct a machine, one carefully put together out of certain gears, gears which will only work if they’re not tampered with in any way. Manufacturing runs is a key to winning baseball games, and the entire A’s team was put together to manufacture runs. The methods may have been a bit unconventional, but the simple idea of it is so obvious you wonder why everyone hasn’t been doing it for years.

Watching Beane and Brand make their plan work generates an interest and excitement you--or at least I--generally don’t find in more conventional baseball flicks. Their efforts are met with resistance from manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who thinks he should play the big names (Carlos Pena, for example), as that’s the way the game has always been played and that’s what put butts in the stands and gets people to turn on their televisions. That isn’t how Beane and Brand’s method works, though, so the A’s initially don’t win and Beane and Brand take the heat.

A lot of people will already know the outcome (the winning streak the A’s put together in 2002 [a sequence of events handled incredibly well here; it’s the only real baseball action in the movie, so its inclusion actually seems special] and the Red Sox’s World Series win in 2004 proved the method works), but there’s something so fundamentally entertaining about watching smart, likeable guys working toward a goal that Moneyball did for me what Field of Dreams or The Natural never could. The naked, obvious emotional manipulation of those movies could never do what the intellectual pull (which in turns leads to an emotional pull) of this one managed to do. I never thought I’d see anything come close to being a cerebral movie about sports; I’ll be damned if Moneyball doesn’t, though.

As good as it is, though, the movie’s not a complete success. The pacing can be a bit pokey at times, especially early on. Beane’s relationship with his ex-wife (Robin Wright) is awkwardly shoehorned into the plot. His relationship with his young daughter (Kerris Dorsey) is handled well in the beginning, but at some point she starts edging toward becoming one of those precocious moppets you often find in sports flicks, and for some reason she’s the character Zaillian and Sorkin chose to saddle with much of the script’s expository dialogue. And there’s one scene I absolutely hate; it has a character explain something about (and to) Beane I can’t imagine anyone watching won’t already understand. But hey, I didn’t say it was a perfect baseball movie, only the best I’ve ever seen.      

THE VIDEO

The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer has a bit of trouble resolving the movie’s generally dark visual scheme. Bennett and cinematographer Wally Pfister give the movie a largely naturalistic look, and most locations are lit and photographed to look as realistic as possible. This results in colors that are vibrant but never oversaturated or unnaturally bold, natural skintones, a nice contrast between the various settings, and several scenes that dazzle with their depth and clarity. But it also means a lot of dark interiors, and the encode doesn’t handle blacks very well, which leads to more than a little crush. Aliasing is also a problem at times, particularly in more complex clothing patterns.

THE AUDIO

The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (in English, French, and Spanish varieties) fares a little better than the video presentation, but the movie’s sound design is just a bit uneven. There’s a good sense of place in some locations (cramped offices, a parking garage, the clubhouse, crowded stadiums), but others lack atmosphere and color. Dialogue always sounds excellent, as does Mychael Danna’s terrific score. The low end provides good reinforcement for the other elements of the mix.

An Audio Description track is also included; English, English SDH, Chinese, Korean, French, and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Moneyball: Playing the Game (19 minutes) is a standard making-of featurette.

Billy Beane: Reinventing the Game (16 minutes) offers interview clips with Beane and a few people who’ve worked with him.

Three deleted scenes (12 minutes) offer what are essentially extended versions of two scenes (undoubtedly trimmed because they were unnecessarily redundant) and one completely excised bit (undoubtedly cut because it features a character who would be seen at no other point in the movie and served no real purpose in the narrative).

A single blooper (3 minutes) has Pitt struggling to get through a take (laughing to the point of crying).

FINAL THOUGHTS