Moneyball-management or the odd ways to beat sports odds...

Rating: 8/10 (31 December 2019)

"Moneyball", directed by Bennett Miller, respects the viewer's intelligence so much it elicits a rather unexpected non-emotional response towards sport. Sure it's one of these movies that are more about the business than the game and one thing for sure, the way odds never work as we expect is part of sports' beauty; still, the film isn't concerned about the beauty of the game.
First, I'm not American, so although I've seen countless movies about baseball, the game is still total mystery for me. However, I know one thing or two about the laws of odds when it comes to sport and the particular mechanisms of sport business to understand the following: just because something is logical on the paper doesn't make it bound to happen on the field. Let's take an example in a sport I know a little better: football, or as Americans call it: soccer.
Real Madrid had all the best players in the early 2000s: Zidane, Beckham, Figo and Raul to name these, it was their best team on the paper and yet from 2002 to 2006, before the Barça got Leo Messi, they didn't win the Spanish championship and they had to wait a whole decade before winning the Champions' League. Once again, all the boxes were ticked talent-wise but something was lacking in another department. And then they had Zidane as a coach for less than five years and they won the League four times, including a winning streak of three, a record. It couldn't be luck, it couldn't be the sole presence of Ronaldo who was there for at least five years before the first win, but something did catalyze his talent as well as the other players.
This example proves that sports obey to certain rules that are less about reuniting than managing talents together and sometimes, winning isn't made of having the best players by any means but by getting the best game from any players. Because even a Real fan would admit that the Barça had the best team. So it's not just a matter of being the best and if you get that, you'll get "Moneyball", a film that relates the 2001 2002 season when the Oakland A's beat the odds and broke a record of 20 consecutive victories thanks to a new unorthodox approach from the manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and his right-hand man, Peter Brand, a nerdy expert in statistics played by Jonah Hill (both will be Oscar-nominated for their performances).
The duo defies the traditional scouting methods (consisting on picking the players with the best ratio of financial accessibility and ratings) through a new statistical approach of the game based on Excel tables and a meticulous examination of past results and combined percentages. So they manage to form an unlikely dream-team with players who were constantly overlooked, including some who never dreamed to play again. The core-idea is that at the right time with the right combination of factors, any team can win,;it all comes down to create these factors... and convince the no-nonsense coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to let the players play.
It takes a while to make this "omelet" of victory and of course, it doesn't go without breaking a few eggs, and a few egos. Among the many things Brand learns about the business is to tell a player that they let him "go" and the quicker he gets to the point, the better... nothing personal and strictly business. The catch of that (no pun intended) is that everything works like a business and makes Beane's situation antithetic to a certain vision of sports. The film gives us a few hints about his youth when he was a 'natural' (à la Redford) who had all the makings of a champion, who abandoned school to be a professional and for some reason, never really took off and became an infamous casting error.
Beane's paradox is that he had personal reasons to make his team win, he wants to matter for baseball and yet the methods he pulls are so mathematical, so rigorous that he reminds me of that quote about Ace Rothstein in "Casino" : "he was so serious about it all that I don't think he ever enjoyed himself" And that might be the irony of Beane, he takes the business so damn seriously that he seems dispassionate about the 'playing', only the outcome matters. It says a lot that he doesn't even watch the games. Pitt plays a paradoxical character whose hate for loss is stronger than his love for the game, which makes all the victories feel good and gratifying but not quite emotionally rewarding.
"Moneyball" was written by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillan and you can feel both the cold/methodical approach and the human/character study touch, at the end, we have someone so serious about his job he doesn't enjoy it a bit. And Pitt has a way to play these characters who seem detached even from things they supposedly enjoy; that he's divorced doesn't even surprise... if he handled his marriage with Robin Wright like he did with baseball. At the end, the only person who seems to bring genuine love and fun is his daughter (Kerry Dorsey), which shows the only facet of his life that isn't made of regrets and dreams of revenge.
Now, the film is based on a true story, which means it couldn't afford a different ending, but talk about irony in the end, we don't get the limits of Beane's approach of victory, but of "personal" victory, as an individual, not a manager. In fact, the ending proves him both right and wrong, and remind that just because you get the recipe doesn't make you a good cook for all that, and after all, even Zidane is struggling right now with Real Madrid.
"Moneyball" addresses audiences used to sports archetypes to better subvert them and through its philosophy of winning, it manages to create a rather uninspiring and depressing movie about underdogs, which is quite an achievement story-wise.