A Sticky Floors and Salty Popcorn Review-Moneyball

*I would like to apologize for the lack of updates in the Shallow End recently. My grad studies have migrated my blogging vigor to misplacedjayhawkreporter. Expect a few more frequent updates when my editing/reporting duties die down next semester.*

"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

A Sticky Floors and Salty Popcorn Movie Review-The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This is a Western? It seemed to me to be two and a half hours of Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt staring at each other. I thought I'd picked the film out of the wrong section of the DVD store. I really wanted to like this film, and to be completely honest, there are a ton of great performances here. Jeremy Renner, Sam Rockwell, and Sam Shepard all shine in supporting roles, but with the possible exception of Rockwell none of them are given enough time to fully develop their characters. Zooey Deschanel seems like a cruel, sexy afterthought thrown into the film for the heterosexual male audience who likely are a little uneasy two hours into the film by the thick sexual tension between Ford and James. I mean, I'm not a Freudian or anything, but the scene with James in the bathtub? More than a little suggestive that something more than hero worship is going on in Ford's head.

Affleck and Pitt are superb, but only when they aren't simply gazing into each other's eyes...which has to be roughly 50% of the film. I mean, Affleck stared into the camera so intently I thought he wanted to kill me by the end of it. The first two hours of the film, consequently, stand as a sickeningly melodramatic foreplay for the aesthetic and intellectual feast that occurs in the film's final 30 minutes. The most interesting part of the movie occurs once James is dead. The psychological toll the assassination has on the Ford brothers is infinitely more interesting than James' descent into madness.

I was also a bit off-put by the past-tense third-person narration present in the film. The only reason I can figure the director decided on this approach was to constantly remind his audience that this re-telling of the story must be digested by an audience removed from the Romanticism of James that was present following his assassination. At the same time, however, Dominik goes out of the way to establish this presentation of James. In the scene where James reveals he has killed Ed Miller to Charley Ford, James insists that Ford should "pity him" as well. By the end of the film, it's difficult not to. The cold, passionate voice of the narrator simply seems out of place. Though I loved the decision of how to shoot the final moments of the film. If it had ended any other way, I would have been more upset than I am.

As it stands, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not the sum of its spectacular parts. The film drags as an art-house investigation of a time period that simply isn't conducive to that kind of treatment. One gets the feeling that the story being told on screen isn't the truth, but simply another one of Ford's stage shows with overly temperamental characters. Crying doesn't make a Western edgy and realistic, as Dominik seems to want it to do. It simply suggests another kind of Romance that is not heroic. I don't prefer that approach to the gritty realism of, say, an Unforgiven. If you're a Pitt or Affleck fan, however, you can do worse than a viewing.

Verdict: 3/5 stars