A Baseball Movie That's Not About The Baseball

Rating: 10/10 (18 January 2019)

26 September 2011. Surprisingly, this movie is less about the baseball game than the game of baseball. What is striking about this movie (and it's not about outs) is the raw audio sound technique used in this movie that is usually found in documentaries than feature films which helps make this movie come alive. There is a the ambiance of background sound and the echo that seems to resonate and bring the movie closer to the audience and present a much closer to realism experience. There isn't that much actual continuous footage of baseball in this movie, but rather the management of it. The heightened personal and emotional tension is carried throughout the movie and Director Bennett Miller has put together this compelling very intimate portrait of a man played by Brad Pitt and his statistician in an unusual angle of the game of baseball.
Somehow the almost overly brief snippets of scenes and background of current events and story are blended together along with poignant flashbacks will edited into some meaningful, main storyline without ever creating the idea of that the additional footage has someone been shortchanged. Bennett Miller apparently in his wisdom was able to capture the primary message of the movie, developed an accompanying background, and maintained the singular story around the entire movie, the art of carefully scriptwriting and editing.
Even without the formulaic all-American ending, Bennett Miller was able to wrap this movie into a complete feeling of wholeness for a feature film. Miller made excellent use of silence and editing choices in keeping the camera going just long enough for the more in-depth, substantive emotional impact of a scene to sink in. Miller seems to have brought a new found vision of a approach that brings a more connectiveness and meaningfulness to film-making, especially to interesting stories of reality that aren't even about the biggest and most momentous achievements of humanity and bringing them captivatingly to the big screen.