"It's hard not to be romantic about baseball."
So says Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) at a pivotal moment of the denouement in Bennett Miller's "Moneyball." Writ large, we might say the director and film have a hard time not being Romantic about American individualism.
Like Michael Lewis' book that inspired the film, baseball is merely a narrative overhang in Moneyball, a kind of distraction for the sports crowd while more subversive plot threads are un-spooled within. At the center of this narrative web is Beane himself, who is presented as a fractured former player whose impulse to be smarter than the game is endeared emotionally to the audience in a series of biographical flashbacks. This produces the effect of a biopic without an emphasis on the bio, and provides the framework for a climactic merging of timelines that underscores the metaphoric significance of the film as a whole.
Pitt embodies Beane with such perfection that even the tired clubhouse tirades become matters of high drama. Pitt's Beane broods, but Bennett deftly unfolds a narrative that makes this brooding palatable. Voices early in the season about the failure of the A's inundate both the audience and Beane on-screen, exacerbating the "us against hte world" mentality that is established in the opening moments of the film. Actual footage of the 2001 American League Divisional Series dances across the screen, devoid of any type of sociopolitical slant aside from the flashing of the respective payrolls of the two teams before the game's final out. The Yankees, who would eventually lose the World Series to the Arizona Diamondbacks, triumph over the A's in a scene that has the potential to be tasteless in its disregard for post-9/11 sensitivities until it flashes the smiling mug of Rudolph Giuliani. Beane still smashes a transistor radio into tiny bits, and the frame of Moneyball is born.
The other half of the "us against the world" mentality is filled in (literally, the character Peter Brand is merely an amalgamation of several associates Billy Beane worked with at the A's in the early 2000s) by Jonah Hill. Hill plays the part with his usual pathetic charm and naivety, which is entirely called for in his depiction of 25-year-old statistics expert Brand. As the film progresses, a clear rapport develops between Hill and Pitt that keeps the heartfelt moments between them from becoming melodramatic. In particular, a scene near the end of the reel has Beane and Brand reviewing film of a game with Brand's intent to show Billy just how important what he's done to the game of baseball is. Aaron Sorkin is incredibly evident in this scene, as Brand's admission that the game film they have just watched is a "a metaphor" astutely deflects the schmaltzy weight of the scene. Sorkin's writing never lets you forget that this is a sports film, just as "The West Wing" was a show about White House politics, "A Few Good Men" was a courtroom drama and "The Social Networks was "the Facebook movie."
As teased above, though, Moneyball is about much more than the game of baseball. It's equal parts biopic, conventional sports story and Ben Franklin-esque American autobiography. In no scene is this more apparent than when they all come crashing together at the end of the A's record-breaking winning streak in September of 2002. I had a very real moment of cognitive dissonance watching my beloved Kansas City Royals attempt to figuratively destroy the dream of a process they themselves probably should have been employing at the time (don't forget which green pasture Johnny Damon left first, movie-goers), but the importance of this sequence was in no way diminished by my boyhood biases. As Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) rounds the bases after a walk-off home run to win the A's 20th consecutive game, images from Beane's distant and recent past flicker across the screen in a very Roy Hobbs-eseque moment. The success of a man has translated to the success of a team and, by extension, an idea.
Moneyball succeeds in remaining neutral on the analytic/Romantic debate about baseball, as we leave Beane choosing loyalty over prosperity and to the strains of his daughter's guitar and lyrics identifying Beane as a "loser." In an analytically cold sense, maybe this is true. But the Romantic story of American ingenuity expertly draped over this sports film is much more satisfying.
Verdict: 4.5/5 stars
Sticky floors made more sticky by the inability of the reviewer to gracefully open Dr. Pepper bottles.
ReplyDeleteAlso, your review is good, man.
I try to add everything I can to the ambiance of the cinema experience.
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