"An island of misfit toys"

Rating: 9/10 (8 September 2012)

"There are rich teams, and there are poor teams. Then there's fifty feet of crap. And then there's us" Billy Beane coldly states at a meeting early in Moneyball. Beane is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, which in 2002, were the lowest-salaried MLB team, that began their season with eleven loses in a row. If it hadn't been for Beane's devotion to the team and the excellent crew working alongside them, the team may have likely spiraled down to become one of the worst performing teams in MLB history.
Beane (portrayed excellently by Brad Pitt) was recruited as a player to the MLB at a young age, and after failing to drum up much attention, was assigned the A's GM in 1998. After losing to the New York Yankees in the 2001 postseason, Beane continued to seek out other options, hiring the Yale-educated Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), working as an assistant for the Cleveland Indians at prior to this, to work as the numbers-cruncher for the team. Brand quickly pulls up a list of "misfit players" that should be going for a higher price, but are ostracized because of their quirks. Even on a limited budget, they recruit a number of lesser players and went on to compile a team that would win twenty games in a row, the highest winning streak of any MLB team in history.
Moneyball closely examines Beane and Brand's tireless game with numbers, how both of them faced opposition from the A's manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and despite being overwhelmingly successful at the game, Beane's constant dissatification with the team as a whole, even saying that winning twenty games is meaningless unless you win the final game of the season.
The one person he continues to keep close to him is his young daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey), who becomes increasingly worried about how her father could do so much to help yet remain mostly unmoved by it all.
Writer Aaron Sorkin pens Moneyball with a rare side of cynicism not only from Beane but from the sport of baseball itself. The complexity of the game is stunning, the statistics sometimes brutally unfair, and the stress and anguish of it all, unfathomable in every sense. I rarely attend major league baseball games, and usually stick to the humble, but sophisticated Midwest League when I am hungering for baseball. I'm sure the stress is there about as much as it is in the bigger ballparks as well.
Sorkin, who penned The Social Network just a year prior to this, continues his streak of taking a questionable premise and making it interesting, informative, completely understandable to anyone regardless of interest or education, and shows the importance of slick, flowing dialog from character to character.
Moneyball is a wonderful work of supreme intellect, on a subject that more often than not spawns a by-the-numbers story. Pitt is increasingly favorable as Beane, Hill works wonders with the dramatic screenplay, and Hoffman brings yet another fabulous performance to the table in his string of successful ones. And even when one of those three are not taking screen (which is a rare occurrence), we still get wonderful, stylistic visual flair. This film has it all.
Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Directed by: Bennett Miller.