Best Written Sports Film

Rating: 8/10 (27 September 2011)

While Moneyball is by far the most original take on America's favorite pass time, it is not exactly what you would expect from a movie about baseball.
Two things Aaron Sorkin knows how to write are controversial figures and excessive amounts of jargon.
If you have ever tried playing a video game of baseball with your friends, but then gave up trying to play after you noticed how long they were taking and how excited they were getting to build up an empire in the franchise mode, then you should know exactly what to expect from Moneyball. The language and mathematics of Americas favorite pass time is put before everything including the actual game itself, which is both the solution and problem to the film in general. The writing of the script does not loan itself as much to the game as it does to the politics behind it.
Therefore the commitment Sorkin makes to the characters of Brad Pitt as Billy Beane and Jonas Hill as his assistant Peter makes this a lot more of a sports drama than an actual sports movie, which almost makes for poor casting of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the head coach of the Oakland A's. All Hoffman does as the head coach in Moneyball is pout around the office over every decision Pitt makes, which he does well. But Hoffman could've played anybody else besides the head coach while anybody else, including the actual head coach who was actually considered for the role could've played the head coach because the head coach doesn't really do much in Moneyball.
However the story of Moneyball isn't about the head coach of the Oakland Athletics. Moneyball is about the Oakland Athletics Manager Beane and how Beane replaced three key players in his franchise. The kind of pressure that position comes with is a side of the game that fans of baseball do not get to see and either that's entertaining to you or it's not. For me this is probably one of the best written major league baseball movies I've ever seen.
Every decision made by Beane is made with an authoritative confidence that is difficult to argue. The only person backing Beane's decisions in Moneyball is the assistant, helping him make them with his thorough evaluation of statistics. These two together are what also makes Moneyball fun to watch for the risk factor involved in every decision they make as a bizarre series of trial and error. With Peter as Beane's assistant and Kerris Dorsey as his daughter, Pitt as Oakland Athletics Manager Beane has more than enough support, on or off of the field.
Both of these relationships are what allow us to like Pitt as Beane, an under dog in this game of Moneyball, even though nobody else does. And that seems to be a characteristic trait of Sorkin's hand in script writing so far besides politics.
Nobody close to Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network liked any of the decisions he was making neither. But Zuckerberg's decisions are exactly what gave birth to Facebook while the movie about him written by Sorkin got him nominated for an academy award.