Moneyball review

Rating: 8/10 (7 November 2011)

This is a story about pioneers changing old patterns of business-as-usual, but Brad Pitt's affecting portrayal of Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane gives this movie its heart. It opens in 2002 as the team is losing a championship game to a team with three times more money. The New York team has simply hired more of the best players, which Oakland can't afford to do. Billy sees that unless the team tries something different, they are going to lose again next year; yet his scout/advisers almost absent-mindedly to go back to the same failed practice of hiring the second-rate players that the team can afford, while expecting there to be a different outcome. Their "intuition" amounts to arguing over whether a player has any confidence based on whether or not he has an attractive girlfriend.
Billy's innovative solution turns out to be common sense, but he doesn't know what it is to begin with; rather he feels his way toward it gradually. The first step is to see the problem, but the next step is to see if anyone else sees it, too. How can they jointly solve a problem if only he can see it? Billy asks his scouts to articulate the team's problem and is frustrated when none of them can put it into words; but the problem is simple: the team doesn't have the money to hire the superstar players who invariably beat the Athletics. Billy sees this, but he does not know how to fix it until he goes to Cleveland to trade players; there he notices that their manager is listening to the whispers of a little nebbish named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who turns out to be a brilliant player analyst. Peter's insight is that there are many players in baseball who are under-valued for what are often silly reasons. For example, one pitcher has a peculiar way of throwing the ball, and all of the scouts tell Billy he should be rejected because he looks ridiculous, but Peter points out that this pitcher nevertheless has a decent record. Because prejudice against such odd players is widespread, they can be picked up for a song, and a team made up of similarly under-rated players, Peter thinks, could be a winning team.
After banking on Peter's approach, Billy faces another problem. Coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) doesn't understand what Billy and Peter are trying to do, so he keeps playing the players he thinks are best. The team loses game after game. Ironically, the soundtrack presents excerpts from a sports radio call-in show where host and fans agree that the team's poor showing is the fault of Billy and that Art Howe is doing the best he can. Finally, Billy figures out a clever if risky way to outfox Art so that he has no choice but to send in the lineup that Billy and Peter have chosen. After that, the team's fortunes improve dramatically, but when they lose another season-ending championship game, no one remembers how much they have improved over the previous year. Billy is denounced by the experts: "You can't reinvent baseball", one of them intones authoritatively.
The final development in the story proves that the "money" in "Moneyball" has nothing to do with greed. Billy seems almost to surprise himself when he turns down a multi-million-dollar contract with an East Coast team owner who recognizes what Billy is trying to do. The owner wants him to do the same for the Boston Red Sox, but Billy knows that what he really cares about are his daughter and his work with the As, and both are in California.
Pitt makes us care about Billy's quest not just to win but to achieve personal fulfillment. His performance communicates the depth of his character's passion for his job and his family. Billy not only has a work ethic but a genius for recognizing a problem and its solution. He also has the humility to realize that he needs someone with the technical expertise to help him, and the friendship that develops between Billy's former jock and Peter's Ivy League nerd is tender and genuine. Through most of the film, these two are the only ones who believe in themselves and each other, and they back each other when no one else stands with them.
As I watched, I kept having the impression that Pitt is channeling Robert Redford, but I am not convinced that this is intentional. Perhaps it is just something that is happening to him as he enters middle age. (One could hardly age more gracefully than that.)