Moneyball
Sports films “based on true events” are often painfully formulaic, seldom doing justice to the drama of actual on-field events. But thanks to the unlikely dramedic tandem of Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, the formula drawn upon by Bennett Miller’s Moneyball is a winning one. Indeed, as an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s non-fiction bestseller of the same name, it’s also literally about a winning formula—or more accurately, the various statistical formulas collectively known as sabermetrics.
If that sounds like a bizarre or boring premise for a major motion picture, Pitt and Hill, along with screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, invest the film with humour, humanity, and a compelling, if familiar, narrative thrust. Ultimately, the formulas themselves are as peripheral to Moneyball as a certain Facebook-spawning, window-scrawled equation was to Sorkin’s Oscar-winning script for The Social Network. At its heart, Moneyball is a tried and true underdog story, albeit one that plays out chiefly in the front office and less so on the diamond.
Pitt portrays Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, whose stat-savvy wheeling and dealing keeps the A’s competitive in a league perennially in the shadow of the New York Yankees’ $114M payroll. With a relatively trifling $39 million at his disposal, Beane defies traditional baseball wisdom to fit ostensibly square pegs into round holes and sets records in the process. Rather than the A’s vs. the Yankees, it’s Beane’s analytical forward thinking vs. baseball’s intuitive old guard that is Moneyball’s central conflict. Like The Social Network, it’s a human account of a paradigm shift, accessible to fans of hardball and Hollywood storytelling alike.
A still-rotund Jonah Hill shines as Beane’s awkward math whiz of a right-hand-man, and thanks to Sorkin’s snappy dialogue, Moneyball‘s scenes of boardroom banter are some of its most entertaining. Miller, though, doesn’t entirely abandon the trappings of cinematic baseball and delivers the inevitable winning-streak montage that culminates in a do-or-die game, framed in floodlit chiaroscuro. These are slightly manipulative moments, but provide the film with a rousing, crowd-pleasing climax that doubles as a welcome source of vicarious catharsis to beleaguered Blue Jays faithful.