Moneyball is not a sports movie. To be sure, our national pastime does feature largely in the plot of this true life saga, but the movie isn’t about baseball, not really.
For non-baseball fans: the Oakland Athletics are among the poorest teams in Major League Baseball – itself nothing more than a lucrative business for teams like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox – and can’t afford the ridiculous salaries superstars now demand.
General Manager Billy Beane’s stroke of luck comes when he meets fictitious Yale graduate Peter Brand, who explains to him the hitherto unheard of principles of “moneyball,” or the idea that a small-market team can compete with the likes of the Yankees by dealing only with undervalued players who reach base frequently but are overlooked by every other team for some arbitrary reason.
This, of course, flies in the face of traditional baseball knowledge, which lends more credence to players’ personalities, or “intangibles.” In this sense, Moneyball is not about teamwork or winning outright, but rather how the perennial loser, in this case Beane himself, must break away from the pack in order to overtake it further along the road.
Brad Pitt as the lead role of the Oakland Athletics’ now legendary general manager Billy Beane seemed like a questionable casting choice; Pitt simply does not seem like a baseball person, maybe because his famed good looks do not square with the mental image created by a typical general manager like the Yankees’ Brian Cashman.
Jonah Hill was also an unusual choice for the role of Peter Brand, the quiet Yale grad with a degree in economics and a passion for crunching baseball stats. Neither Hill’s admittedly great roles as Seth in Superbad or Sherman Schrader in Accepted elicited much serious acting. Hill, however, puts on his finest performance to date in Moneyball, unequivocally demonstrating that he is an actor capable of portraying a wider range of characters than he has previously been allowed.
Both Hill and the experienced Pitt handle the transition from their previous comedic roles to the subtler melancholic acting demanded by Beane and Brand’s characters without a hitch.
Here, director Bennett Miller deserves credit as well. Under his guidance, Moneyball avoids the pitfalls of the standard sports movie to which we have all become accustomed. Rather than focusing on the Athletics as a group of individuals who come together as one team to win a record 20 straight games in the American League, Miller looks at the cutthroat, purely business side of baseball to create an unconventional and unique movie that defies genre.