Money's Not Even A Good Way Of Keeping Score.

Rating: 5/10 (7 December 2012)

Brad Pitt is Billy Beane, General Manager for the Oakland Athletics. I add, for our overseas friends, that the Oakland Athletics are a baseball team in California, distinguished chiefly by their outer uniforms of dull gray and their jerseys of putrid green. And I will take a guess that this story is based on fact because no writers would deliberately give a baseball manager a name like Billy Beane outside of a comedy.
It's directed by Bennett Miller, and a very nice job he's done too. Here we have a story about the tense decision-making that goes on behind a game in which there is plenty of suspense and action, and yet Miller uses a classic approach to the narrative. The camera doesn't wobble drunkenly. The cuts aren't instantaneous. The speech has the rhythms of real life with hesitations ("umm," "ahhh") and pauses, either awkward or thoughtful, between utterances. Viewers used to crackling commotion and ballbreaking bustle may be disappointed to find that most of the important stuff takes place in offices and the facilities of a stadium. Nobody wrenches anybody else's head off. And there's no sex and little sentiment.
The acting is on a par with the direction. Brad Pitt is pretty good, despite his conventional good looks and muscles. His job is to figure out how to turn a losing team with no money into a winning team with no money. The rest of the cast is fine, including Philip Seymour Hoffman in a relatively minor role as Pitt's antagonist. Pitt has a teen-aged daughter too, but she's not a modelesque beauty, thank God, just an ordinary looking kid. Jonah Hill plays a chubby economics graduate from Yale, one of those freaks who has really gotten seriously into baseball stats, along the lines of Steven Jay Gould. By means of complex mathematical equations that are never explained, and which you and I wouldn't understand anyway, Hill has computerized every player's potential, based strictly on performance, and scored them on a ratio scale. The human element is not quantifiable so it's dropped. Pitt decides the kid is onto something and adopts the anfractuous and inhuman rating system wholesale, dumping some players, trading others, buying still others who look oversold.
It's not entirely successful though. Again, the colors are drawn from the ghoulish end of the palette, no help to those sleeves. And the writers have made a big mistake. They've assumed a certain level of knowledge of the game that some viewers simply won't have. Take my brother, for instance. Here he is, sitting in the living room with Dad. Dad's in his usual undershirt, guzzling his beer, and watching a ball game on the tube. My brother shows no obvious interest in the goings on and Dad asks if he, Dad, is correct in assuming my brother is bored. "Yes." Then Dad asks whether Bobby is interested in the game, and my brother says, "Not as far as I know." Okay. The game proceeds for a minute, then Dad turns to my brother and asks, "Are you guys faggots?"
A second error, though I don't know that it could easily have been avoided, is that the script tells us nothing about the tactical details of the game or, indeed, about the players. I couldn't tell one from the other. At one point, Pitt advises a player to stop stealing second base. "That's what I do." "Well, don't. You're paid to get a hit, not to get thrown out at second." The exchange is meaningless because it lacks context. We don't know the player; we don't know that he tries too often to steal a base. Nothing. All the tension is focused on Pitt's character as he desperately tries to implement Hill's computer theory before -- wait for it -- he discovers that "winning isn't everything" and that "money isn't a good way of keeping score."
Yet, those weaknesses aside, this a refreshing movie, innovative in its naturalism and in the apparent spontaneity it manages to capture. If only the narrative weren't all so awfully foggy.