‘Moneyball’ is funny, deep and illuminating
By Roger Moore
Orlando Sentinel
“Moneyball” is a thinking person’s baseball movie, and a baseball fan’s thinking movie.
It’s based on the Michael Lewis book about Billy Beane, the ex-ballplayer turned Oakland A’s general manager who upended the game by rebuilding his team through cold-hearted statistical analysis called “sabermetrics.” “Moneyball” takes a dry story about numbers and no-name ballplayers and turns it into something funny, deep and illuminating.
And as Beane, Brad Pitt gives perhaps his smartest, subtlest performance ever. His Beane is a man at war with himself. He’s as superstitious as any baseball fan — he won’t watch his Oakland A’s play, even when a trip to the World Series is on the line. He may show a little of Brad Pitt’s swagger when he’s making a trade or imposing his will on the manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) or the team. But in flashbacks, we see the Beane who once was a bonus baby, a promising prospect who spent years trying to break into the big leagues to make use of the prodigious talents all the scouts claimed he had. The older, wiser Beane knows, better than the crusty, contemptuous coots who are his team’s scouting corps, that “confidence” is one thing all their hunches, gut feelings and stats-quoting can’t measure. And confidence, which did Beane’s playing career in, just may be what is still holding him back.
Stuck with a small-market club with a limited budget, a team that cannot hang onto its stars, this guy who “hates losing more than I love winning” tells his scouts, “You’re asking the wrong questions.” They grumble. They brush him off. They base decisions on a player’s look, how “ugly” his girlfriend is. And they’ve been doing it for decades.
But when Billy stumbles into a doughy young Yale economics grad named Peter (Jonah Hill) who has better questions, he’s ready to start a revolution. It’s not about batting average, it’s about getting on base. It’s not about defense, it’s about runs.
It’s a triumph of tone and much of this spins off of Pitt, who plays a caring but absent dad, a distant boss who has to be ruthless and a thin-skinned ex-jock who is buried under a mountain of criticism when things go wrong. As they will.
Pitt’s Beane pithy wisecracks sum up how one plays the general manager’s game — “When your enemy’s making mistakes, don’t interrupt him.”
Pitt makes this guy flawed, uncertain, temperamental and impulsive. His is a performance that makes this an inside baseball movie that even non-fans can understand and enjoy. And he plays this confidence-starved gambler with a verve that Oscar voters are almost sure to reward, sometime after the dust has settled on another baseball season.
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