Moneyball

UK Release Date. 25 November 2011
Certification. 12A
Running Time. 2 hours 13 mins
Director. Bennett Miller
Cast. Stephen Bishop, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Chris Pratt, Robin Wright.
Rating. 73%

Review.

In a plain serif font - stark white letters set against a completely black background - the prologue to Moneyball proclaims,

"It's unbelievable about how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life."

- Mickey Mantle

Even with my rudimentary knowledge of baseball I know who Mickey Mantle is. But one of the major plus points of Moneyball is that you do not need an in-depth knowledge of the grand old American game to enjoy the film. In some ways, Moneyball isn't even about baseball, instead, Moneyball is a film about process, strategy and the conviction of one's beliefs.

The 2011 film is based on the book Moneyball: The art of winning an unfair game by American author and financial journalist, Michael Lewis. The eponymous term 'moneyball' refers to an empirical sabermetric approach to analysing players, as opposed to traditional statistics such as batting average, number of home runs or RBI metrics.  

In Moneyball, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), a former professional baseball player and now General Manager of the Oakland Athletics is tasked with assembling a competitive Major League Baseball team on a shoestring budget, despite losing three star players (Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen) from the successful play-off season line-up from the year before. He does so, not by the traditional means of scouting and player development, but by the introduction of a purely statistical approach.

Initially, to the amusement of the baseball establishment, Billy and Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), his newly recruited and rapidly promoted Assistant General Manager assemble a farrago of a team in which a player's on-base percentage counts more than his batting average.

Following his widely acclaimed directorial debut, Capote in 2005, Moneyball is the second feature length film directed by the American filmmaker Bennett Miller. The film is expertly constructed, which is no surprise considering the screenplay was written by two of the finest screenwriters of the last 25 years - Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. Disparate though their styles may be, the pair end up working effectively in tandem to present a near-perfect screenplay. 

Brad Pitt is superb. He strikes the perfect balance between superficial aloofness and latent intensity. Pitt has both gravitas and nuance, making his portrayal of Billy Beane compelling viewing. It is a genuine tour de force performance. And whilst Pitt and Hill may initially seem like an unlikely screen pairing, the scenes between them are a delight. At first they struggle to find an effective working language, but soon both are imposing the revolutionary ideology on the archaic scouting committee, led by Grady Fusion (Ken Medlock).

These exchanges are only rivalled by the interactions with the impervious Team Manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hoffman imparts the character with a stubborn, melancholic disposition - "I disagree with you, plain and simple. And moreover, I'm playing my team in a way that I can explain in job interviews next winter."

The delight in Moneyball is the linear, methodical, character-driven approach to real-life events (albeit real-life events imbued with a fair bit of dramatic license) that revolutionised the way Major League Baseball analyses player performance. It is safe to say that few, if any, General Managers ignore such data today.