On the Money

Rating: Null/10 (23 September 2011)

Here's an enjoyable sports film with history behind it and heart inside it. The facts: Under the general management of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) the Oakland A's achieved a phenomenal 20 game winning streak in the early part of this century. The cost: less than two thirds the expenditure of the Yankees. The real cost: players let go and Bean ridiculed, until his winning streak, which changed baseball forever.
Moneyball's heart is in Brad Pitt's gentle performance, the best of his career depicting Beane's cool assurance relying on the statistics that have always been available, rather than the guesses of his scouts. A major part of the success is the data-mining mind of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a 25 year old Yale economics grad with a statistical approach that predicts the strength of players who have been marginalized or let go by other clubs. Sabermetrics is his creation, a strategy that builds on player strengths ignored by supposed experts.
Unlike most other sports films, even the storied Any Given Sunday, Moneyball delivers organically, just a slow series of setbacks that are nonetheless essential to eventual success. Although we know the outcome, director Bennett Miller strategically paces the early struggles to make you care about the characters, even the negatively traditional coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Where some other films may surpass Moneyball is their showing the reasons on the field for the team's success, whereas here only some locker room chat and brief counseling can be seen as contributory.
Like other sports films as well, the middle sags like Art's belly until the winning streak naturally enlivens the somber mood during the losses. Yet the film is exemplary in its feisty meetings as scouts square off against general manager Beane, who is slowly challenging their philosophies of status quo and intuition.
On that note is the real strength of a film that exalts both creative thinking and mathematical accounting. Yet never is any of this change made easy