Moneyball, A Baseball Story That Doesn't Totally Fill the Big Screen

Rating: Null/10 (25 September 2011)

It's a movie that begins and grooves (for a while) with a promising premise – that is based on a true story of a then-novel way to determine the true value of major league baseball players and how the Oakland Athletics' used that approach to fill three critical departures.
Starring Brad Pitt as real-life general manager Billy Beane, the movie gets off to a intriguing start with a compelling conflict during a meeting between the team's general manager, Billy Beane – played by Brad Pitt – and a group of seasoned scouts and player development officials. The off-season focus of the pow-wow is to determine how to fill the void created by the free-agency departure of three star players – Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi and Jason Isringhausen.
The solution – much to the incredulity of the old guards – begins with the stealing of a young Cleveland Indians official, a recent graduate from Yale with a degree in economics, who is a devotee of the Bill James statistical school of thought that revolutionized the value we attach to ballplayers. Portrayed with nerd-perfection by Jonah Hill, it doesn't take him long to get Beane to wed himself with a religious fervor to this novel approach.
Leading to the acquisition of three castaway players who nonetheless statistically equate to comparable replacements in place of the departed top-dollar players, the approach is initially stymied by the team's manager Art Howe (played by Oscar winner Phillip Seymour Hofffman) who doesn't buy into it and is determined to manage the team – such as it is – as he sees fit.
While he is clearly one of the greatest actors to walk the earth, Hoffman is cast in an understated role. If before seeing this movie you make the mistake of watching a DVD of him in previous raging roles such as his turn as a beleaguered priest in Doubt, you will truly be frustrated by the emotional leash he wears throughout the film. Although the conflict between the manager and Beane leads one to believe that one of Hoffman's patented furious and always entertaining explosion performances is in the offing, it disappointingly never happens.
For knowledgeable baseball fan, it doesn't take that good of a memory of this not-so-distant sports history to recall that the A's have not been in a World Series since 1990, and that makes for an inherent spoiler from the start. The otherwise success that takes place during that 2002 season offsets that somewhat, but the last 40 minutes of the movie is anti-climatic to that which came before (and really never reached a climatic point).
Far from being spoken in the same breath as the greatest baseball movies of all-time, its main value is in telling the somewhat true story of the innovations pushed by Billy Beane, who is still seeking a real-life World Series appearance and championship. Brad Pitts does the best he can with the role and script he has been given, as do the rest of the actor. However, at the end of the movie, it is an interesting question that begs – without the overhead cost of the stars and production values, would the filmmakers have made a more compelling and profitable movie if they had done it as a documentary? Such a question leads to the conclusion that the talents of Pitt and especially Hoffman were largely wasted in Moneyball.
While a documentary could have expanded further on some of the more illuminating revelation of the latest in statistical number crunching and thereby possibly make a thought-provoking film, pouring the 2002 Beane/A's story into plot glass leaves it less than half empty.