Moneyball Surprisingly Has Intelligence And Depth

Rating: 10/10 (1 September 2012)

Moneyball is a sports drama film based on Michael Lewis's book of the same name which gives an account of the Oakland Athletics baseball team's 2002 season and their general manager's attempts to assemble a competitive team.It stars Brad Pitt,Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Based on a true story,it is a movie for anybody who has ever dreamed of taking on the system. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's and the guy who assembles the team, who has an epiphany: all of baseball's conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane will have to outsmart the richer clubs. The onetime jock teams with Ivy League grad Peter Brand in an unlikely partnership, recruiting bargain players that the scouts call flawed, but all of whom have an ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. The team's scouts are first dismissive of and then hostile towards Brand's non-traditional sabermetric approach to scouting players, most notably Grady Fuson – who is fired by Beane after insulting their approach, and takes to the radio airwaves and doubts the team's future. Rather than relying on the scouts' experience and intuition, Brand selects players based almost exclusively on their on base percentage (OBP). By finding players with a high OBP but with characteristics that lead scouts to dismiss them,Brand assembles a team of undervalued players with far more potential than the A's hamstrung finances would otherwise allow. Despite vehement objections from the scouts, Beane supports Brand's theory and hires the players he selected, such as unorthodox submarine pitcher Chad Bradford. Following the free agent signings, Beane finds that he also faces opposition from Art Howe, the Athletics' manager. With tensions already high between them because of a contract dispute, Howe disregards Beane and Brand's strategy and plays the team in a traditional style despite their unsuitability. Beane eventually trades away the lone traditional first baseman, Carlos Peña, to force Howe to use the new recruits.Early in the season, the Athletics fare poorly, leading critics within and outside the team to dismiss the new method as a dismal failure. Beane convinces the owner to stay the course, and eventually the team's record begins to improve. Ultimately, the Athletics win 20 consecutive games, setting the American League record. Their streak is capped with a victory over the Kansas City Royals.
The movie is not a traditional sports movie, and indeed should be just as gripping for non-sports fans. It's not a series of Big Games. When it goes to the field, it's for well-chosen crucial moments. Its essence is in terse, brainy dialogue by the two accomplished screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian. As in "The Social Network," abstract discussions reflect deep emotional conflicts. There are a lot of laughs, but only one or two are inspired by lines intended to be funny. Instead, our laughter comes from recognition, an awareness of irony, an appreciation of perfect zingers — and, best of all, insights into human nature.
This is really a movie about business. None of the individual players have major roles. The drama all happens in the mind of a general manager and his numbers guy. They bet against tradition and in favor of numerical analysis. That goes against a century of baseball history, although for all of those years, fans have thumbed through their baseball almanacs and issued mind-numbing statistical theories on talk shows. What the numbers crunchers demonstrated is that a computer can assemble a team better than human instinct.Finally,what is surprising about this movie is that it has intelligence and depth as it presents a man who is about to redeem himself from his past failures and overcome the present challenges and obstacles that he is currently facing in the achievement of his goals.