Moneyball (2011)
Sports movies tend to follow a similar template: triumph over adversity, the little guy succeeding over the big man. And whilst Moneyball contains elements of this, it’s also a robust film in its own right, spearheaded by a marvellous performance from Brad Pitt. He plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a team at the bottom of the league whose best players are constantly being poached by bigger teams. Off the back of losing three of his strongest players, Billy is taken by a chubby, nebbish economics graduate from Yale, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), whose statistics-led approach to baseball he believes might just help the Athletics become a real force to be reckoned with. It’s an approach – based on how many times a player gets “on base” rather than an innate sense of their athleticism or hitting power – that doesn’t go down well with the old men of baseball, led by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s head coach, who stubbornly refuse to support or endorse Beane and Brand’s idea. As Beane begins recruiting an odds-and-sods mixture of players (one is older, one likes to party, etc.), you think you know where this is going, and, indeed, the film builds up an exciting sense of momentum. But then it does a strange thing. It levels out. The lack of climax is undoubtedly a lack of interest in the traditional peaks and valleys inherent to most sports narratives, but you can’t help feeling the lack of emotional pay-off (there are precious few sequences of people actually playing baseball) at the expense of servicing a perceived sense of “reality.” The emphasis on naturalism is also occasionally hindered by errant Sorkinisms peppered throughout the script (he co-wrote alongside Stephen Zaillian), that amuse in the moment, but hamper what the rest of the film is trying to achieve, I think. But that’s not to say that the film doesn’t have any heart, thanks in no small part to Brad Pitt giving what is perhaps the best performance of his career, and certainly a real one-two punch after The Tree of Life earlier last year. His take on Billy Beane has a lived-in quality that’s reminiscent of Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler, but he also brings his own sense of authority and creased heartache to the role that is particularly affecting during the film’s superb closing moments. The baggy middle stops Moneyball from being truly great, but it’s intelligent, literate filmmaking that will in all likelihood see Pitt receiving a deserved Oscar nomination in a few weeks time.
