Okay well I don’t really know what to say about this movie because I know just enough about baseball to know that I don’t know anything about baseball, and I haven’t read the book that it’s based on so I can’t compare it to that; I guess the only thing I can say is that I really liked it even though I feel like on paper there’s no way Moneyball should be entertaining.
First of all, pretty much the whole movie is guys sitting around talking about baseball. Like, that’s literally all they do. Which was cool with me, because I love baseball, but I don’t really have any way to gauge how much a non-fan would enjoy it.
Second, the main character in the movie, the A’s general manager Billy Beane, comes across as kind of a dick. He seems to spend the whole time being frustrated with his staff for their (understandable, in my opinion) reluctance to go along with his radical vision for building a baseball team, throwing around office furniture, and dealing with the massive chip on his shoulder for missing his own big shot at being a major league player.
Fortunately Moneyball manages to negate both of these potentially serious shortcomings with some seriously great casting. Brad Pitt’s charisma and universal likeability make the moody Beane a hero worth rooting for, making you feel sympathy rather than annoyance at his numerous superstitious behaviors, neurotic quirks, and unpredictable emotional displays. When I first saw the trailers for this movie featuring Jonah Hill as baseball savant whiz kid Peter Brand I was like, WTF is he doing here, this is not a stoner comedy, but he actually manages to convey the nervousness and awkwardness of a guy who is more comfortable with computers than with people really convincingly.
So those two were definitely the stars of the film, but I was more excited to see Chris Pratt, a.k.a. one half of the most adorable couple on the best show on tv (Parks & Recreation‘s April and Andy), in a small but fantastic role as an injured player who thinks his career is over but is given a second chance at the majors. The one cast member who I felt like was seriously underutilized was Philip Seymour Hoffman; as A’s manager Art Howe his main job is to pout and be mad at Billy Beane for giving him a crummy team. Which he definitely commits to, but I feel like you gotta give the guy a little more to do.
The one line about Moneyball that I keep hearing is that it’s a baseball movie that’s not about baseball (this review at Awards Daily is the only source I could find that contained that actual phrase), but I’m not sure how true that is. Toward the end there’s an attempt at connecting Beane’s efforts in Oakland with the universal struggle of innovators and early adaptors, but that didn’t really feel like the point of the movie to me. It mostly just made me curious about the state of the moneyball philosophy in baseball today, because it does seem like a tough pill to swallow.
“It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball” is the line Beane repeats a couple of times and one that stuck with me, because even as the movie tries to demonstrate the superiority of cold, hard statistical analysis over those elusive “intangibles,” it can’t help but succumb to the romanticism of the classic sports movie moment. Which is actually okay by me, since it kind of shows that while stats and logic certainly have their place, that magical moment is what keeps sports fans coming back for more.
