Moneyball, the 2011 film adaptation of the 2003 Michael Lewis book, is an interesting idea for an American sports movie. It is the real-life story of Billy Beane, the General Manager of the struggling Oakland Athletic's baseball team in 2001 after they lost some major players and didn't seem like they would ever make a success of themselves. The problem was money - baseball is an inherently unfair sport, where big teams like the Yankees have all the money to buy themselves the best players, while smaller teams like the Oakland A's are caught in a downward spiral of low budgets and no-name players. However, all this changed when Beane decided to put his faith completely in sabermetrics, the use of purely objective data and statistics to analyze a player's worth. With this approach, he built a team of unknowns and players that nobody else wanted, and managed to create a machine that went on a 20-game consecutive winning streak, an American League record.
All this reads like your typical underdog sports story, and the film spends the majority of its 2-hour running time chronicling the slow but steady ascent of the Oakland A's during that season. The climax is the 20th game, when it looks like the A's won't make a record winning streak after all, but then a last-minute home run saves them. This is a twist that would seem unbearably cheesy if it wasn't for the fact that the game really did play out that way in 2002. It's a heart-pounding, anxiety-ridden event, played up with the requisite silence as you see the ball soar away and then the cheers of the crowd when they realize what has happened. All of this makes you, the audience member, cheer and shout as well, celebrating the triumph of the little guy.
But, the story doesn't end there. Yes, the A's did manage to defy the baseball world and all the commentators who said that a team based solely on player statistics could never succeed in the game. Unfortunately, despite their record winning streak, they didn't manage to win the games that counted and as of 2011, have yet to ever make it to the World Series. Which is a strange way to end a film that is ostensibly about beating the odds.
A word on the acting (this is a movie after all) - Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, and while he's doing his usual Brad Pitt shtick, it works just fine. He is a thwarted player, who gave up a scholarship to Stanford to play for the Mets right out of high school, and life hasn't exactly worked out according to plan. You feel for him when you see flashbacks of his dashed ambitions, but his passion for the sport is evident, most of all at the very end of the movie when you find out that Beane turned down the chance to be the highest paid general manager ever for the Red Sox in order to stay with the A's. Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand, the stats whiz with a degree in Economics from Yale, whose equations and computer programming let him evaluate all the available players and hunt for the best bargains. You know when you complained about learning algebra or calculus in high school and your parents insisted that it would all be relevant in the real world? Well Peter Brand is the character your parents were talking about, as he geeks out on complex statistics to create a blockbuster sports franchise. Philip Seymour Hoffman does a turn as the team manager who stridently opposes this newfangled approach to baseball, while the team is nicely rounded out by a bunch of supporting actors (notably Chris Pratt of Parks & Recreation fame) who valiantly do their bit and give the film plenty of heart.
The nitty-gritty details of strategically playing the game went whooshing past my head as I know nothing about baseball. However, the actors do a great job of making you root for these characters, and even though the statistics and terminology were a jumble of nonsense as far as I was concerned, I didn't care because I just wanted everything to work out. That's the hallmark of a good sports film: it has the ability to get you invested in the team, even if you know nothing about the sport. When the A's win those 20 games, you are elated, but when they lose the important match against the Minnesota Twins, you groan, wishing that real life didn't have to be so disappointing.
Hollywood tends to insist on grand sports movies that end on a positive note of unparalleled success. And that is what makes Moneyball a refreshing twist on the classic Hollywood sports movie. It embraces reality and the fact that you can't always hit that game-clinching home run when it counts. Instead, it is a loving ode to the game of baseball and the fact that you have to take chances if you want to get ahead. As Billy Beane claims towards the end of the movie, "You can't help but be romantic about baseball." That's the kind of poetic worldview that keeps an underdog going.
All this reads like your typical underdog sports story, and the film spends the majority of its 2-hour running time chronicling the slow but steady ascent of the Oakland A's during that season. The climax is the 20th game, when it looks like the A's won't make a record winning streak after all, but then a last-minute home run saves them. This is a twist that would seem unbearably cheesy if it wasn't for the fact that the game really did play out that way in 2002. It's a heart-pounding, anxiety-ridden event, played up with the requisite silence as you see the ball soar away and then the cheers of the crowd when they realize what has happened. All of this makes you, the audience member, cheer and shout as well, celebrating the triumph of the little guy.
But, the story doesn't end there. Yes, the A's did manage to defy the baseball world and all the commentators who said that a team based solely on player statistics could never succeed in the game. Unfortunately, despite their record winning streak, they didn't manage to win the games that counted and as of 2011, have yet to ever make it to the World Series. Which is a strange way to end a film that is ostensibly about beating the odds.
A word on the acting (this is a movie after all) - Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, and while he's doing his usual Brad Pitt shtick, it works just fine. He is a thwarted player, who gave up a scholarship to Stanford to play for the Mets right out of high school, and life hasn't exactly worked out according to plan. You feel for him when you see flashbacks of his dashed ambitions, but his passion for the sport is evident, most of all at the very end of the movie when you find out that Beane turned down the chance to be the highest paid general manager ever for the Red Sox in order to stay with the A's. Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand, the stats whiz with a degree in Economics from Yale, whose equations and computer programming let him evaluate all the available players and hunt for the best bargains. You know when you complained about learning algebra or calculus in high school and your parents insisted that it would all be relevant in the real world? Well Peter Brand is the character your parents were talking about, as he geeks out on complex statistics to create a blockbuster sports franchise. Philip Seymour Hoffman does a turn as the team manager who stridently opposes this newfangled approach to baseball, while the team is nicely rounded out by a bunch of supporting actors (notably Chris Pratt of Parks & Recreation fame) who valiantly do their bit and give the film plenty of heart.
The nitty-gritty details of strategically playing the game went whooshing past my head as I know nothing about baseball. However, the actors do a great job of making you root for these characters, and even though the statistics and terminology were a jumble of nonsense as far as I was concerned, I didn't care because I just wanted everything to work out. That's the hallmark of a good sports film: it has the ability to get you invested in the team, even if you know nothing about the sport. When the A's win those 20 games, you are elated, but when they lose the important match against the Minnesota Twins, you groan, wishing that real life didn't have to be so disappointing.
Hollywood tends to insist on grand sports movies that end on a positive note of unparalleled success. And that is what makes Moneyball a refreshing twist on the classic Hollywood sports movie. It embraces reality and the fact that you can't always hit that game-clinching home run when it counts. Instead, it is a loving ode to the game of baseball and the fact that you have to take chances if you want to get ahead. As Billy Beane claims towards the end of the movie, "You can't help but be romantic about baseball." That's the kind of poetic worldview that keeps an underdog going.
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