Moneyball

Overview

The unfortunate thing about genre movies is how often they’re judged solely by way of comparison against their own kind. Action movies undergo the Die Hard test, romcoms are stood alongside When Harry Met Sally or The Seven Year Itch and every sci-fi flick must inevitably endure the 2001: A Space Odyssey comparison instead of being considered purely on its own merits. The problem is that anybody who’s not a fan of a particular ‘type’ might easily overlook a film they’d otherwise wholly enjoy, just as critics might dismiss a movie simply because of its genre. This was perhaps never more obvious than with the furore following the 2009 Academy Awards when The Dark Knight was ignored for Best Picture on the grounds it was ‘just a superhero movie’ – a miscalculation now widely acknowledged as the reason the number of nominees has since been increased from five to ten.

It’s therefore disappointing but unsurprising to find Moneyball being analogised to baseball staples like Bang The Drum Slowly and The Natural rather than critics simply asking: is it a good movie? That’s because the answer is a resounding “yes” – and it goes far beyond anything that might simply be termed a ‘baseball movie’. Instead, Moneyball is an exceptional movie that just happens to be about baseball.

Adapted from the book Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game, it tells the true story of the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane. When Beane (Brad Pitt) realises his small team can never hope to match the enormous budgets of clubs like the New York Yankees ($41 million vs $125 million) he embarks upon a radical overhaul of the system that eschews more than 120 years of prevailing ‘baseball wisdom’. Assisted by a young Yale economics graduate named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), Beane sets out to identify and recruit undervalued players in the market by way of a rigorous and objective statistical approach known as ‘sabermetrics’. It’s effectively ‘sport by spreadsheet’ and the approach sets forth a fascinating David and Goliath season that threatens to completely change Major League baseball forever.

Directed by Bennett Miller (Capote) and co-written by Aaron Sorkin (pretty much everything), Moneyball is fundamentally a movie about the birth of an idea and the quixotic crusade of two men determined to see it through. The performances are excellent throughout, with Pitt and Hill ably supported by Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Wright. The dialogue’s definitely heavy on jargon but not prohibitively so, and the story manages to achieve an excellent level of suspense regardless of whether you’re familiar with how the season played out in real life.