Rookie mistake

Rating: 5/10 (12 April 2012)

Based on the book Moneyball: The art of winning an unfair game by Michael Lewis, Moneyball charts the true story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), controversial general manager of struggling baseball team The Oakland A's. With a budget, three times smaller than some of his rivals; Beane must build a new team for the start of the 2002 season. Coupled with the departure of three of his star players, Beane has his work cut out. Billy's luck changes through a chance meeting with Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) a Yale economics graduate and statistician. Brand encourages Beane to use a sabermetric, that is to say statistical approach to buying baseball players.
It will be hard for me, a person with no prior exposure to Baseball, to write a fair review for Moneyball. From the start the film is awash with baseball jargon and statistics and as a result long periods of this film were for me as interesting as the word sabermetric. Audiences can enjoy films jam packed with technical, nonsense terms take Star Trek for the ultimate example. Crucial though is the fact that the plot hinges on these terms. If, like me, you do not know what getting 'on base' is then forget trying to piece a coherent story out of this film. (It means by the way: 'a measure of how often a batter reaches base for any reason other than a fielding error, fielder's choice, dropped/uncaught third strike, fielder's obstruction, or catcher's interference.') – oh right.
The dynamic between Pitt and Hill is by far the most enjoyable part of the film, they bounce off each other with ease and at times their dialogue had the wit and snap that you would expect from an Aaron Sorkin screenplay (The Social Network). The phone negotiations over the player Ricardo Rincon is a particularly slick scene.
Critics have lauded Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performance as the team manager Art Howe and I have to admit he did not put a foot wrong. He was hardly stretching his measurable acting ability though; being required to fold his arms on their belly and look disgruntled for almost the entirety of the film.
The pace of the film is slow and meditative not least because we join Billy as he mulls over a decision he made as a young man to turn down a Stanford University scholarship to pursue professional baseball. We are shown flashbacks of his decision and the consequences. This gave the film some nice depth but by this point I was losing interest in the story and the characters. I could not engage with the story when it was awash with jargon and terminology which were alien to me.
The tenacity that was displayed by some individuals to get this film into production is quite astounding. The rights for the book being bought back in 2004 and being passed through the hands of three directors. I struggle to understand the resonance that this tale of stats must have for the filmmakers involved.
Director Steven Sonerberg acknowledged that the challenge of making Moneyball into a film: 'to dramatise and make interesting a book about statistics'. For me, they did not rise to that challenge.