Climbing Higher Pictures

The beginning of each Oscar season is hard to pin down. It used to be November and December were the creme de la creme of the awards fare, but the start date has been pushing ever so slowly backward, into October, and now, into September itself. There’s a lot of buzz on Moneyball coming out of the festival circuit, with a commanding leading performance by Brad Pitt and a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Is it worth the hype it’s been getting?

Moneyball Review

by Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: B+

What is a person worth? In sports, your value is measured in basic statistics, batting average, runs batted in, goals scored, touchdowns thrown. This value directly correlates into how much money the athlete expects to be paid, and in the realm of baseball the sky is basically the limit. Baseball has no salary cap the way some other professional sports do, so the sky in question is at different heights depending on which team you’re examining. This is a David and Goliath story, with the Oakland A’s of 2002 running at a budget of about a third what the Yankees had to work with. Billy Beane, general manager of the team, wants nothing else but to win a World Series, but he can’t afford the players to stay competitive, particularly when New York and Boston took away two of his biggest stars, Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi, in the offseason. Something’s got to give, and everything changes when Beane takes a Yale economics major and statistician under his wing to teach him a thing or two about what makes a winning team. This is the tale of what they accomplish together, and the best part is that it’s all true.

Many have said that Brad Pitt is a front running for an Academy Award this year. Make no mistake, Pitt is terrific, but I don’t know if this performance is enough of a stretch to warrant the early buzz. He does spend an awfully large amount of time pondering, sitting, and staring off into space, so much so that you could have probably tightened the film by at least fifteen minutes without losing any of the story. Staring off into space does seem to be enough to win a Best Actor Oscar these days though, so maybe he really does have a shot. Most audience members will not have a problem watching Pitt do just about anything for two hours, and he’s so charismatic and genuine that you can see the appeal, I just hope there are at least five other impressive performances worth honoring by the end of the year.

The biggest surprise for me was Jonah Hill. He really keeps his persona in check here, and it’s probably the best acting work he’s done so far in his young career. His nervous and excitable assistant GM gives the film it’s purpose, working as a catalyst for the new direction of the team. He brings his state of the art (for 2002 anyway) laptop and analysis software to the dingy film room in the Oakland A’s basement, crunching the numbers he believes it would build an affordable champion ball club. He takes little of the risk upon himself initially, but realizes the impact his calculations are having as the story progresses. His growth and maturity works as a great companion to Beane’s struggles to stay on top even while working to re-invent the game he loves.

No matter what happened with the players under the lights, this is Beane’s story, and the filmmakers keep the spotlight squarely on him as the season plays out. We don’t spend much time on the field because Billy himself doesn’t like to watch the games, preferring to do donuts in his truck while sporadically listening on the radio. The film makes some great choices when it comes to what moments to focus on, and I loved the development we had with Beane’s daughter, and the way that informs our understanding of the man himself. Aaron Sorkin is credited as one of the writers on the project, and it’s interesting to note that this doesn’t sound like a Sorkin film. There’s still a lot of great dialogue bandied about, but it’s more iconic than it is flashy or verbose, and everyone feels satisfyingly solid and real as opposed to the super intelligent characters that dot most of Sorkin‘s work. This is a well crafted, well built piece of filmmaking on just about every front, but what it achieves with a solid foundation, it gives up with a lack of ambition. This could’ve been one of the greatest baseball movies ever made, and it seems all too happy to settle for what it knows it can manage rather than reach for something more. I had a lot of fun watching it, and I think you will too, just don’t expect to be blown away. There’s no baseball learning curve whatsoever, and the story is just as accessible as any other character overcoming odds drama, so don’t let the subject matter keep you away.