Moneyball

One could assume that Brad Pitt would fit like a hand in a batting glove into the great lineage of superstar actors who have taken their turn at bat in a film of America’s favorite pastime.  Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, John Cusack, and Robert De Niro to name a few, have lead films both good and great, while undeniably allowing passion for the game, perhaps a wishful thinking of a different career path, to seep from the constraints of their characters.  Brad Pitt certainly has the stature, and armed with the words of heavyweight screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, it would seem that Moneyball has everything it needs to stand proudly alongside its homerun predecessors.  Unfortunately the screenplay is but an illusion of great writing, a superficial meditation on the logistics of baseball that plays out a little too close to the field in terms of audience investment, both intellectually and dramatically. 

It doesn’t take long to begin rooting for Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, introduced to us after yet another losing season, and currently embroiled in behind-the-dugout negotiations, and pressures to assemble a new team with the potential to actually win for a change.  Before we even know anything about him we like him, because he is Brad Pitt.  Hollywood banks on audience recognition and emulation all too often to insulate a screenplay otherwise lacking in substance.  But if that doesn’t do it for you, Beane also has an ex-wife, a daughter, and gosh darn it, he wants to change baseball.  See, baseball used to be about the game, and now it is all about money, and Beane’s anguish over this fact puts him in the same cinematic world as Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire.  You go Brad; you change baseball.  And that’s exactly what he sets out to do, enlisting the help of composite character Peter Brand, a Yale economics graduate who believes the secret to a winning team lies in statistics and probability.  Reducing the game to the percentages of time players get on base, Brand’s sabermetric approach is just what Beane needs to shake things up, and as might be expected, telegraphs clear opportunities in the script for drama as team dynamics are stretched to the breaking point through his building a team from a bunch of miscreants and minor league write-offs.  But surprisingly, for a Hollywood film, none of this material, however cliché, is ever mined for a dramatic payoff, and that’s where Moneyball fails to hit it out of the park.

An expected narrative trajectory for this type of film, which also happens to be found in actual Oakland A’s history, would be for the team to lose at first and then start winning, and that’s exactly what happens.  Early and often scenes between Beane and his team captain Art Howe, a usually great Philip Seymour Hoffman, make no attempt to hide the film’s belief that initial losses are due to Hoffman’s refusal to position the team in the correct manner to maximize statistical advantage.  Armed with barely an overview of Peter Brand’s methodology, the audience is left with no other reason to side with Beane than star power.  Beane is far too passive a character, storming out of the room in scene after scene, refusing to take action until the film’s running time dictates he finally trade-off some players so Hoffman has no choice but to do what he wants.  Throughout these scenes we dislike Howe's stubbornness; with a less recognizable actor in Beane’s shoes I’m not so sure that would be the case.  But the sheer number of these scenes still builds tension, and we long for the confrontation between these two characters once the team starts winning and Beane is proven correct all along.  But it never comes.  There is no such scene, and no release for the tension that, as a result, quickly begins to morph into dissatisfaction.  And that is Moneyball’s problem; in every conceivable area it consciously avoids subplots, populated by a cast of characters that are reduced to nothing more than local color for our Billy Beane.  His ex-wife is there, Robin Wright, an explicit tension between him and her new husband is there, and his daughter is there, but as Gertrude Stein famously said about Oakland itself, “there is no there there.”  Nothing ever comes of it.  It would take a matter of seconds to concoct any number of subplots with these characters, yet Steven Zaillian’s script defiantly avoids all of them.

One could applaud this approach I suppose, but it’s not hard to avoid all manner of clichés and pitfalls when you avoid all manner of storytelling altogether.  And it’s refusal to get too complicated with regards to sabermetrics means that while it turns away from a more traditional Hollywood blockbuster like Jerry Maguire, it doesn’t really turn toward anything.  Consequently, it is no accident that fictional Peter Brand, wonderfully played by Jonah Hill, who is a revelation here, all stoicism with a hint of underlying baseball fever, is Moneyball’s greatest asset.  His character delivers the film’s only original contribution to the pantheon of baseball films, but even he suffers, as being a foil to a character that barely evolves makes him seem like just an employee, not allowed to shine, when I would easily watch an entire film with him as the main character.  Moneyball would have benefited from a more detailed analysis of Brand’s revolutionary ideas.  It needed a few more scenes early on that were not afraid to completely lose the audience in baseball and mathematical jargon.  If the characters are real, and they believe what they are saying, then I will believe them.  Moneyball is too busy dumbing-down its subject matter while at the same time ramping up unfulfilled dramatic expectations.  ¾ of the way through the film it suddenly becomes about Beane’s desire to win, a final justification for his methodology, and a leftfield character arc that just seems grafted on, because the film’s lack of subplots don’t allow for Beane’s evolution.  The final exchange between Beane and the owner of the Red Sox is the greatest scene in the film, and has to have been written by Sorkin (The Social Network), who was called in for a rewrite after inital director Steven Soderbergh was fired, and who has an ear for dialogue that usually leads to great scenes because his characters talk the way we all secretly wish we did.  Here the entire film is summed up, and Brad Pitt’s hero status comes full circle, but no amount of million dollar dialogue can conceal the fact that Beane did not arrive at this moment, despite the film's belief to the contrary.  

Steven Zaillian’s career in the nearly twenty years since writing Schindler’s List overflows with material suited for a great writer.  But covering great material doesn’t automatically make it great, and it is this illusion that makes Moneyball completely transparent and unworthy of comparisons to The Natural, Bull Durham or Field Of Dreams, each in their own right exemplars of story first and ideology second.  Moneyball is minor league at best, a no-hitter that decided to be about numbers instead of characters, but then refused to let them all add up.  **1/2 out of *****