Moving, beyond numbers

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2012)

"It's hard not to be romantic about baseball. This kind of thing, it's fun for the fans. It sells tickets and hot dogs"
Moneyball is a sports movie what makes it stand apart from the crowd is that it takes all the clichés that are associated with sports movies such as heroic games, emotional moments and motivational speeches and turns them down on their head to deliver a movie that delves in the cold and calculative science behind sports- in this case being sabermetrics. Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, specifically baseball statistics that measure in- game activity. Thus it is all about objective knowledge related to baseball, It points out facts such as which player has the highest onbase percentages rather than subjective arguments such as who is the best player in the game.
Picture this- in a conference room at the Oakland athletics headquarters, baseball scouts and team management are squabbling to pick stars for their team. And while evaluating prospective players, phrases that go around are-"clean cut, good face, good jaw", "he is a good looking ball player", and my favourite "when he hits the ball, it pops off his bat. You can hear it all over the ballpark. There is a lot of pop". It is then that a manifestation dawns upon Billy Beane - that the current technique of player selection is flawed and unsuitable for teams with smaller budgets. When he stumbles across Peter Brand, a fresh out of Yale statistician, he realizes that he may have found a more cost effective way to get the right players in the team and do battle with the 800 pound gorillas in the league. Using statistics he finds value in players that no one else seem to do. People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws- Age, appearance, personality. Mathematics cut straight through that, and Billy, is able to create a championship team that they can afford, because everyone else in baseball undervalues them. After initial setbacks, he manages to effect a dramatic turnaround from a written off team to claim, at 20 games in a row, the longest winning streak in the history of the game.
"I hate losing more than I even wanna win" says Brad Pitt as he plays a career defining role as Billy Beane, a reclusive general manager for the Oakland A's who when young promised much as a player, but turned out mediocre. Having taken up scouting, and later a managerial role in a team riddled with middling performers and a tight budget, he is so intense that he does not go to watch his team play, yet he is able to make himself look indifferent as he says that making relations with players will soften him up when he has to make tough decisions about who to keep on the roster and who not to. He finds losing repulsive, yet that seems to be his fate unless he is able to embrace the principles advocated by Peter, played by the usually fat king of vulgarity- Jonah Hill. And what a revelation Hill is in this movie- he is precocious, understated and nerdy to Pitt's charismatic, yet in his quietly confident and softspoken way, he matches him in every scene, proves that there is life for him after he "outgrows" (pardon the pun), teen comedy. Being riled by scouts yet having analyzed tons of players in the league, he is able to influence Beane to try out his theories which he believes will bring the team out from the rut that it currently is in. Juxtaposed between them and not quite seeing things the same way, is the bull headed coach of the team, played excellently again by Philip Seymour Hoffman- so much so that he continues to frustrate not only the lead characters, but also the viewer in his obstinacy- you so want to get inside the screen and sock him. Some of the movie's best scenes involve intense discussions, and standoffs between these three characters.
The movie is based upon 2003 best-selling book by Michael Lewis, "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game"- and while baseball continues to remain the backdrop, the movie touches upon how difficult organizations find it is to change, flattening of hierarchies by the availability of information, and the need for efficiency that capitalism demands. While the strongest element of Moneyball is its script by Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian reminiscent of their work in The Social Network. Its lively, intense and emotional, and yet it has its lighthearted moments.
While it is gloomy to know that a computer can do a better job at assembling a successful team than years of collective human experience and emotions, at the end of it, this is a movie in which brain triumphs brawn. It is intelligent, the script witty, fast paced, and with strong elements of drama. Each frame is a work of art and is lovingly shot- whether the action in the games, or the real action, which in this case, is behind the scenes. The end results don't matter, nor does is matter that Billy Beane is still looking for his first league win, what matters is the change that his thoughts managed to bring to a sport riddled with tradition.
The movie has already garnered 7 Academy Award nominations including ones for Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill and best movie and script also. It has already won the American Film Institute's movie of the year, and it will win many more for though Moneyball says the game is about money, but the movie is about real people, and this makes for riveting cinema. PLEASE WATCH THIS – 10/10