Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball (Sony, 9.23) is my idea of a triumph. A triumph of surprise and deception, I should add. It’s an emotionally low-key, thinking man’s Field of Dreams — a smart, true-to-life, business-of-baseball movie with a touch of the mystical and the sublime, and propelled along by a highly pleasurable lead performance by Brad Pitt. It’s not just the emotional and spiritual currents that makes it great, but the subtlety of them.
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Earlier this year someone called it “the Social Network of baseball movies,” and that’s a close enough description except for the fact that Pitt’s lead performance is highly likable. Moneyball is definitely a nominee for Best Picture, Best Actor (Pitt), Best Director (Miller), Best Adapted Screenplay and so on.
And I don’t want to hear any crap about how it’s not rousing enough or sports-movie-ish enough or emotionally uplifting enough in a Rocky-Warrior sense. Fuck all that. This is a movie about how things work, and what it’s really like to say, “Wait, I’ve got a new idea” and to deal with the entrenched hate that always comes from that.
I’m not into baseball that much but I used to be, and Moneyball re-awakened my affection for the game precisely because it’s a little nerdy — my first text was that “it’s baseball nerd heaven” — and kinda mystical and because it doesn’t traffic in the standard sports-movie inspirational uplift crap…and yet it does do that in a nicely grown-up way.
On a rote level Moneyball is a complex, enjoyably verite, real-life, beautifully directed sports flick about two baseball-underdog iconoclasts (Brad Pitt as the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane + Jonah Hill as a brilliant, Yale-educated nerd-dweeb that Pitt hires) using a kind of new-math strategy to try and win games. But that’s just the plot-engine aspect, the “hook”…whatever.
What it’s really about is the ecstatic, pure-gravy pleasure of watching a first-rate, award-quality fall movie that’s made for you and me and everyone out there who hated Stupid Crazy Love, plus the holy-shit excitement of a serious, Oscar-level Brad Pitt performance. Seriously. Pitt has never had a better-written part, or such a spirited, multi-layered and vulnerable character to dig into, or given a more primal movie-star performance in his life.
Yep — it’s Pitt vs. Clooney in this year’s Best Actor race. Okay, Pitt vs. Clooney vs. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gay Edgar Hoover.
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Moneyball is exactly the kind of sports movie that I’ve recently come to love (i.e., partly a Friday Night Lights-type deal and partly an Undefeated thing but without a do-or-die locker-room speech or a “we’re Number One!” third-act win). It’s mystical, statistical, spooky, emotional and wonderfully original. And wonderfully “pure” in a sense. The complexity mixed with the spirituality and the political reality of things…just brilliant.
Plus it’s elevated all along by killer-level Steve Zallian-meets-Aaron Sorkin dialogue. Did I mention Pitt is great in it?
Put another way, it’s about organizing a baseball team in a different nerdy way (“saber-metrics” and all that) and the political pushback that Pitt and Hill have to deal with from almost everyone, but — this is the exceptional surprise element — it’s also about how the forces and wills of the Gods suddenly step in and make things happen when they feel like it. Angels over the outfield. So call it a nerdy baseball movie mixed with spirituality and politics and adult-level complications…sublime.
Hill is perfect — it’s easily his best performance since Superbad and his first normal-level adult performance. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is tight and testy and spot-on as the Okalnd A’s manager. Arliss Howard delivers a perfect third-act cameo. Robin Wright has exactly one scene as Pitt’s ex-wife (director Spike Jonze plays her boyfriend…hilarious!) Tammy Blanchard is visible as a player’s wife but has no lines. The woman in Pitt/Billy Beane’s life is his daughter (Kerris Dorsey), and she’s all the movie needs.
I’m going to repeat an observation from an HE reader that was initially posted last March:
“Sports films are almost never really ‘about’ sports. They always have a primary, more traditionally cinematic concern on their mind: a relationship on the rocks or a budding romance, the rise of the downtrodden or the triumphant return of the forgotten or discarded. Even the notion of the big game being won is a well-trodden, pedestrian conceit that serves as the usual metaphor for the final challenge a protagonist or team must face.
“Moneyball may well be the first sports film not seen through the prism of a romance a la Bull Durham, a character drama a la The Blind Side, a tragedy a la Brian’s Song, or a comedy a la Major League. Rather, it is the first of its kind: a sports film seen through the prism of sports.”