Who knew that Steve Zaillian was capable of writing such an impersonal screenplay?

Rating: 5/10 (5 October 2011)

When the Academy Award nominations are announced in January, there will be two people involved in Bennett Miller's "Moneyball" whom I will be rooting for. Not only that, but given the picture's late-year release and the Academy's habit of voting for fiscally successful pictures, I am sure that Brad Pitt will garner his third Academy Award nomination and that Jonah Hill will claim his first. The movie is certain to score big in the other categories as well, however, I must reserve my enthusiasm for Mr. Pitt and Mr. Hill alone. For it was only through their great performances that any energy at all was built up. They are also due credit for the few great moments that nobly attempted to save the whole picture. The sad news is that, for me, "Moneyball" was an overly cynical exercise that did not bring up anything new about baseball or the people in it and left me feeling rather left-out.
Leaving Mr. Miller's adequate but unremarkable directing aside, the core fault of the picture revolves around a question I continued asking myself over and over again: Who knew that Steve Zaillain (the writer of "American Gangster" and "Schindler's List") was capable of putting together such an impersonal, non-involving screenplay?
I am usually a sucker for sports movies because of something that has been with the genre since the beginning: inspiration and heart. Remember, this is coming from the same reviewer who gleefully recommended "Gridiron Gang" five years ago. However, that uplifting and exciting trend is completely absent in Mr. Zaillian's screenplay, who substitutes moody cynicism in its place. Now of course, the movie is about what Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane did to assemble a team that would go on to hold a record winning streak and not so much about the game of baseball itself, but what it does show us in its behind-the-scenes stuff is rather downbeat. It starts out moody and ends moody. And while this is not necessarily a bad thing (and can be done wonderfully for dramatic effect) the effect here is overall limp and impersonal. Where Mr. Zaillian also fails is what has become his trademark: information. Compare the screenplay with "Moneyball" to his impeccable writing and bucket-loads of fascinating, hard-to-find information for "Schindler's List" and the contrast is staggering. We learned a lot about Oskar Schindler and the Holocaust in that great Spielberg film, but we learn very little about Billy Beane and the general managing of a baseball team that we could not learn from just picking up a newspaper or an almanac. Where is the dope? Where is the emotionally-gripping background plots? For that matter, what has become of the fascinating character dynamics? What little we get is between Mr. Pitt and Mr. Hill, the former as general manager Billy Beane and the latter as his statistics assistant Peter Brand. Mr. Pitt has a daughter in the film, but there is no real chemistry between them, nothing that has not been seen done better in so many other, more confident films. Robin Wright, a charming actress, is given next to nothing to do as Mr. Pitt's ex-wife and Phillip Seymour Hoffmann is merely something in the background, even though his role as the disgruntled A's coach is meant to be an important factor. And although the movie tackles the subject of the general manager having to trade off and let go of players, and tries to use this for dramatic effect, we learn so little about the players of the A's that they frankly could have been extras. That makes the introductory scene to one of them, where Mr. Pitt signs him onto the team, even more pointless than it already is.
Only one scene in "Moneyball" takes place in the rain, but you would never know it by the way Wally Pfister has photographed the images. Mr. Pfister has made his mark, and won his Oscar (for "Inception") by using low-key lighting and vast shadows. However, he overdoes it here. In fact, it's rather amateurish. Every shot in the picture looks as if no lights outside of the staged environment were used at all. It looks grainy, like something shot on a home video digital camera. At times, the shadows crossing Mr. Pitt's face as he ironically stands in sunlight threatens to guise the wonderful expressions he is generating for his performance. The only moment where the drabby lighting works is in a shot where Mr. Pitt is driving at night, at which point we can only see the outline of his face and the reflection of streetlights in his eyes. That is terrific. But the rest is so gloomily-shot it really becomes tiresome.
Mr. Zaillian's screenplay rambles on and on, but what it had to say was not so interesting that it deserved, I felt, so much attention. The movie clocks at a little over two hours in length and the second half of that seemed much longer than it really was. I must again commend the efforts of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Hill, who are so charismatic and so excellent in the film that they actually managed to produce some lively moments, especially early on in the film. But then, that's when they are being spontaneous. By the end of the movie, where they are just speaking in hushed voices, and the moodiness becomes sappily overwhelming, I was left to sigh over and over again in the auditorium. The movie has its moments, but I would be much happier seeing "Remember the Titans" for the umpteenth time than revisiting this coldy impersonal film.