Shockingly, Even Better than the Non-Fiction Book of the Same Name

Rating: 9/10 (25 September 2011)

I read the book Moneyball when it came out, and was long familiar with sabrmetrics, and after seeing the Bad News Bears-style previews had low expectations of a Hollywood movie of the same name.
Instead of the Bad News Bears Turn Adult, or Rocky-on-the-Diamond, or Major League IV: The GM's Revenge -- all things it could have been -- this movie turns out to be an incredibly thoughtful homily on doing the right thing because the facts tell you to do it, because you have no choice but to listen to the voice inside yourself. It's both a parable for (hang on to your hats) the impasse of the political system in the age of the Freakout and the Talking Head, and a reminder that individual conscience ultimately controls your own fate.
Some disclaimers. First off, the book only loosely uses the book "Moneyball" for its text, sort of the way a good Sunday sermon starts out with a passage from the bible and then pulls in all sorts of more topical and contemporary information to make a new interpretation. Those of you looking for, say, the long sequence in the book about the celebrated "Moneyball" amateur draft will find it missing. It necessarily takes an ensemble of real-world characters and reduces it to some amalgams (the Jonah Hill character). And it ignores a lot of the baseball nuance that the numbers open up -- from the contributions of Mulder, Hudson, and Zito to the true meaning of plate discipline. It has to, because otherwise the story and the theme would get lost in the details. For that reason, the book still stands on its own and is recommended, while the movie is going to stand on its own for those who haven't read it.
But this is the kind of remarkable thing: I knew how everything was going to turn out. I knew about the A's winning streak and how the improbable record was set. I knew how the season ended (I was at several of the games) and how and why Billy Beane ended up staying in Oakland, neither fired nor hired away, and why he's still there. And yet I was still riveted by this movie and the way the story unfolded.
There is one sort of semi-sports-cliché montage towards the end of the movie, but it ends very much against expectation. Similarly, the filmmakers pay with the cliché of the "big locker room pep talk" scene, so hackneyed in almost every other sports movie. And they sort of tease by limiting the on-field action to just the bare minimum; just as Billy Beane didn't like to watch the games in person, the on-field story of the A's is not depicted as the central subject matter.
I have no idea how this movie is going to do. For those looking for a traditional baseball/sports movie, it's completely unique -- more like Downhill Racer than Rocky. For those looking for the business-cum-statshead movie, it's not there - such a thing is unfilmable. For those looking for the riotous comedy the previews promise -- well, there's plenty of humor, but it's far dryer and more subtle than the trailers suggest, and a comedy, it is not. For those looking for a treacly he-did-it-all-for-his-daughter money-isn't-everything heartstrings movie, well, the theme is there but it's pretty understated and intelligent - there's no violins.
The visuals for this movie are going to probably not get mentioned a lot, but I think they're the key to understanding the breadth of the ambition of the movie. We get a lot of "real" baseball scenes -- but they're in the mode of the empty concrete hallways of the Oakland Coliseum, the emptiness of the park after hours, the crappy locker rooms. Even the scene at Fenway Park -- really shot there, and looking more like the "real" Fenway than any other movie I've seen that uses it as a backdrop - is done with the park empty and covered with a cold rain that suggests austerity. In the meantime, we get glimpses of the "real" Oakland - working class, full of empty landscapes and ship loading equipment and power lines (without those visuals taking any focus away from the character-driven story) that seem to ably reflect the feeling of being in America in 2011 (not the 2002 in which the story takes place).
I suspect many reviews will focus on this as the "story of Billy Beane" and it's entirely true that as a character, he seizes the story front and center, and Brad Pitt's (definitely Oscar-worthy) performance deserves a lot of attention. Certainly the use of flashbacks (also not done in a terribly hackneyed way, kudos) to underscore Billy's motivations -- which are complex, but may simply boil down to wishing to be a success in a way true to his nature, instead of the conventional wisdom crowd's desire to merely avoid being a failure -- is nicely done.
In the end, it's a brilliant film because it works on at least three levels. It's a reasonable exposition of how an idea changed the game of baseball, not about the people who came up with the idea so much as how the idea wormed its way in. It's not quite a documentary, but it's close in that sense, and should be illuminating for people who don't know that story (and perhaps will send them back to Moneyball, the book, and hopefully the original source material.) On another level, it's a compelling story about one person, not exactly a put-upon working class schmo, in the persona of Billy Beane. And on the larger level, it's certainly a hint about how people have to find their way in a larger system of economics, personality, and politics that is frequently soul-deadening and perplexing and offers few cut-and-dried solutions to the nuanced and complex problems of the world.