Dir: Bennett Miller; Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman
The thought of watching a two-hour film about baseball is unlikely to people in India since they are obsessed with Cricket or hockey. This thrillingly smart drama anchored by Brad Pitt might play out in locker rooms, dugouts and gyms, but it isn’t about baseball at all, it’s about statistics.
This would be of great worry if I was the producer. Because movie is about statistics and to top it up, two pre vious attempts to film this story had failed. But the beauty of this version is that it manages to be gripping, fascinating and thought-provoking without having either. Moneyball recounts the momentous change in fortunes enjoyed by the Oakland Athletics baseball team in 2002. Short on funds and hit by the loss of three key players, the side’s general manager, Billy Beane (Pitt), decides radical action is needed – so he hires Peter Brand (Jonah Hill –resembles Boria Majumdar – Cricket Expert), a economics graduate who claims to have created a formula that can unearth strong players overlooked by the Major League. Brand’s formula analyses players in an entirely new way: it prizes the unglamorous but essential ability to “get on base”, and thereby score points, over the batting prowess, athleticism and chiseled all-American jawlines beloved of the game’s grizzled talent scouts.
From this, Beane is able to piece together a team of rejects and square pegs that has the potential to end his career, unless Brand’s sums add up. Unexpectedly, movie captures best of Pitt / Brand and Philip performance. Their wise decision to concentrate on Beane and his working relationships with both Brand and the Athletics’ skeptical coach over the players themselves keeps the plot on its toes.
All of this comes together in the film’s best scene: a rapid-fire, four-way telephone negotiation in which Beane frantically plays Major League managers off against one another in order to secure the player he wants at a price he can afford.
Moneyball doesn’t conform to the usual sports movie templates, but it’s an accomplished, bracingly intelligent film that scores points, which does rather leave the studio’s early misgivings looking like those of the film’s ageing talent scouts.
In one of its cleverest moments, while Beane and Brand watch statistics whizz past on a monitor, Miller’s camera pushes into the screen and the numbers are revealed to be made up of red, green and blue pixels. Even the hidden formulas are underpinned by hidden formulas. Crack those, and you can do just about anything – even, it seems, make an entertaining two-hour film about baseball. ’s subject may be baseball, but its real drama lies beyond the outfield, in corridors and backrooms. It may be the most engrossing movie yet about sports management