Moneyball

Ah, America... the land of free enterprise, where money prevails over sportsmanship and fair play. A country where salary caps in sport are considered downright unAmerican. So, if you have a two-bit baseball club with about as much cash as an online businessman, how can you beat that? Moneyball tells the amazing true story of a small fry baseball club who dared to think outside the box in order to compete with the big boys. You don't need to be a sportsfan to appreciate Moneyball, in a way it's more about the talent in recognising groundbreaking ideas and the basic inequity that underlies the Great American Dream. It's also about the unexpected impact of information technology on something that's defiantly rigged in favour of the successful, making the film feel a bit like Jerry Maguire meets The Social Network.

Billy (Brad Pitt) is a team manager lumbered with the Oakland A's, a low budget team with a long history of underperforming. Frustration leads Billy to begin looking at the bigger underlying problem - the disparity between team budgets in America's first grade baseball comp, which causes some friction between himself and the rest of the club's administration. Quite by chance, Billy crosses paths with Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a college economics graduate who has devised a way to to beat the system by using computers and statistics. Together they try to overcome the resistance of the old guard and, as expected, it's quite a struggle.

I know it sounds mildly cliched in the way that all sports films do, but there are a few points of difference in Moneyball. These two guys (Billy and Peter) get together and make these great new ideas happen, and who isn't on board with that? Who doesn't like to see that? Sometimes having a great idea isn't enough on its own, you also need someone who can recognise a talented individual and give them the chance to shake things up. This carries on through to every aspect of the film, it's a movie about embracing change. The Oakdale A's change the way they play the game, Billy even changes the way he personally deals with people by allowing himself to get closer to them, daring to change his own rules to give himself that chance at success. It sounds dorky I know, but this film is a winning piece of motivational propaganda without the drawback of it being obviously motivational.

That aside, I don't know if it's exactly Oscar-winning material. This film... it's not a fillet mignon or a delicate lobster dish, it's more like roast beef and potatoes. You'll feel really good eating it, but it's not something that will be remembered for a long time. There's a certain satisfaction that comes when the naysayers in this film are essentially proven wrong, but I don't know if Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill really do anything intense or different enough to vindicate their Oscar nominations. Hill seems to just be getting by on the novelty of not playing an asshole for once, and with Pitt there's always that little bit of distance in his performance that he never seems to be able to shake with leading roles. He doesn't quite connect emotionally with the audience (at least not with this viewer) and I'd argue that he was a lot better recently in The Tree of Life. In Moneyball he seems to be setting himself up as a inveterate workaholic; a man who always eats on the run. I counted at least six scenes where Pitt eats something while participating in a non-eating related activity (like chowing down on something while having meetings with other characters). It's a pretty strange acting choice, but a quick piece of research turned up this page here, revealing that Brad Pitt tries to work eating-related scenes into all of his films!

DIRECTOR: Bennett Miller
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, Steven Zaillian and Stan Chervin. Based on a book by Michael Lewis, which was based on real events.
KEY ACTORS: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Jack McGee.

RELATED TEXTS:
- The non-fiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis.
- Director Bennett Miller previously came to prominence with the film Capote, which also featured Philip Seymour Hoffman.
- Of the sports films I've seen, I think The Damned United is the most similar film to Moneyball. Some other sports films that might also apply (depending on your taste) include: The Blind Side, Invictus, Warrior, Bull Durham, We Are Marshall, Any Given Sunday and Rudy.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Film, Best Actor (Brad Pitt), Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill), Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay.
AFIs - nominated for Best International Film, Best International Actor (Pitt) and Best International Screenplay.
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Actor (Pitt), Best Supporting Actor (Hill) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Golden Globes - nominated for Best Film (Drama), Best Actor - Drama (Pitt), Best Supporting Actor (Hill) and Best Screenplay.