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The hungry heart of Moneyball, a movie about baseball in the digital age, is a beautiful hard case named Billy Beane. Coiled yet cool, Billy has the liquid physical grace and bright eyes of a predator. He was built to win. Even his name, with its short syllabic bursts, sounds ready for ESPN exultations. That he’s played by Brad Pitt giving the quintessential Brad Pitt performance just seals the deal. It didn’t turn out that way, and in 2001 this high school star turned major-league washout was no longer a player but the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, the little team that could but didn’t.
Well, sometimes it did. In 2001 the A’s actually finished second in the American League West, but that October, in the game that opens the movie, they lost the Division Series to the New York Yankees. The score was 5-3, but as numbers that flash across the screen suggest — $114,457,768 vs $39,722,689 — that loss, in the final game of a five-game series, was nowhere near a humiliation.
Based on Michael Lewis’s nimble, joyously entertaining non-fiction chronicle of the Athletics’ sprint toward the top despite the odds and dollar signs, Moneyball is an exuberant fictionalised look at how Beane helped transform the team, one of the poorest in baseball, into serious competition for the wealthiest franchises, mostly by ignoring everything he’d been taught about the game.
Early in Moneyball there’s a funny scene of Billy sitting around with his council of elders: the old-timers, mostly, who scour the country for the next big hope. The old men are jawing about the pluses and minuses of draft prospects, ticking off assets and defects but also body parts. At times they sound as if they’re looking for Saturday night dates, not athletes.
Billy knows there’s something wrong about this received wisdom (one scout insists that an ugly girlfriend means that a player doesn’t have confidence), but he doesn’t have the tools to fix the problem. He gets them when he meets Peter Brand (a just-right Jonah Hill), a computer whiz with an economics degree from Yale and a big man’s waddle. With his glasses and middle-management jackets, Peter looks like he should be crunching numbers at an accounting firm. But there’s a baseball clutched in his hand and a love of the game tucked deep in his being right alongside a radical way of understanding baseball statistics.
Directed by Bennett Miller, from a sharp, sleek script by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin (and a story by Stan Chervin) that smartly borrows lines from Lewis’s book as well as its giddy irreverence, Moneyball is a story about how Billy, with Peter’s help and his laptop crammed with numbers, trades old knowledge for new. It’s a story of baseball and bean counters, the hunt and the kill, yet while there are on-field scenes, the movie is less about the game as a pastime or passion or even a cruel capitalist sport than as a great epistemological problem.
Like The Social Network, which is about the creation of Facebook and yet so much more (it was also written by Sorkin), Moneyball is about a fundamental cultural shift and the rise of the information elite. Instead of going by instinct, Peter knows what he knows because he’s a disciple of Bill James, a once-marginal figure who, starting in 1977, began publishing an abstract that offered a new, rationalised way of looking at the game. Among other things he could see value in under-appreciated, often underpaid and ignored players whom conventional thinkers saw as destined for the minors.
In the movie Peter preaches this new gospel to Billy, who embraces it with born-again fervour, partly because it clarifies the mystery of why he never became the player he was drafted to be: he had the tools, as the scouts like to say, but they just didn’t work in the majors.
Miller, largely shaking off the official art-house pretensions of his breakout feature, Capote, takes all this seemingly dry, dusty, inside-baseball stuff and turns it into the kind of all-too-rare pleasurable Hollywood diversion that gives you a contact high. He still has his serious, or rather too-serious, side: he bookends the story with ophthalmologically close shots of Billy’s eyes shining in the dark, as if soliciting you to peep into the windows of a soul that, as much as any man’s or woman’s can be revealed, emerges through the script and Pitt’s fully inhabited, appealingly barbed performance.
He needn’t have bothered. What works in Moneyball is showing not telling: the scenes of men doing and being and sometimes failing, as in the interwoven flashbacks to the young Billy, played by Reed Thompson.
It’s hard to imagine anyone but Pitt in the role. He’s relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling, as in his testy exchanges, bristling with tamped-down fury, with the A’s manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman, wearing a head of peach fuzz and a scowl).
Though Miller holds onto the romance of baseball that James and others helped strip away (this is, after all, a tale of winners and losers), Billy doesn’t really change: he just becomes his perfect self. When he first goes after Peter, he moves in like a shark. Initially Peter can’t look Billy in the face, and when they talk, Peter keeps dropping his eyes, like the plain girl who can’t believe the hottest guy at school is even talking to her. But he is.
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