Film review

  • Moneyball

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bennett Miller (2011)

    Moneyball came and went in British cinemas pretty quickly, around the turn of the year, which might seem surprising for an against-the-odds sports movie starring Brad Pitt.  I tracked it down to a Vue cinema in Fulham Broadway in the first week of 2012.  Once I’d seen it, I understood why the film’s release was so low key.   The words in Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian’s script come thick and fast and assume a knowledge of baseball.  More than that, Moneyball is about the invasion of a sport by an alien, more objective approach to assessing the value of players – an approach which is statistics-based and might well be seen by audiences as dehumanising (as it’s seen, according to the movie, by those within the sport).  Since the sport in question isn’t likely to matter to most British people in the first place, it’s not surprising that the theory at the heart of the film (a theory which, at one level, reinforces the need for a grasp of the rules of baseball) further limits its appeal.  Yet for me not understanding the language of the sport made next to no difference because the  people in the story and the way that it’s told are so absorbing.  Moneyball is also a reminder of the inherently dramatic shape and substance of great sporting stories – and of what you expect from a sports story on the screen.  To that extent, the movie is self-aware but it’s never at all an academic exercise.  It’s the best American film of 2011.

    Based on a book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball is the true story of Billy Beane (Pitt), general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team.   Following their defeat by the New York Yankees in the concluding knockout stages of the 2001 championship (known as the ‘postseason’), Beane faces the loss of star players and a struggle to replace them:  Oakland Athletics isn’t the wealthiest club in the Major League.  Beane meets Peter Brand (whose real life counterpart is called Paul De Podesta), a young Yale economics graduate with radical ideas about the application of ‘sabermetrics’.  The use of sabermetrics in baseball is decades old but Brand’s particular system attaches central importance to a player’s ‘on base percentage’[1].   Facing increasingly strong opposition from the Oakland scouts – whose nose for a successful player is based on experience and intuition – Beane builds a new team constructed according to Brand’s theories.   They fare poorly at first but Beane persuades the Athletics’ owner to stick with the new approach and it’s rewarded when the team wins twenty consecutive games, an American League record (that still stands).  They qualify again for the postseason but go out in the first round to the Minnesota Twins.  On the back of this success, Billy Beane is offered the job of general manager of the Boston Red Sox at a salary of $12.5 million.  This would have made him the highest paid manager in American sports history but he turns the offer down and stays with Oakland Athletics.  The film’s closing legend explains that the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, a feat which continues to elude Oakland Athletics.  Billy Beane is still the general manager there.

    A few weeks after I saw Moneyball, Sally showed me an article by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair, where he’s a contributing editor.  Lewis described the connections between the theories underlying the sport management revolution pioneered by Billy Beane and the work of the Nobel Prize-winning Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his compatriot Amos Tversky[2].  In their most cited paper, Prospect Theory, Kahnemann and Tversky:

    ‘… convinced a lot of people human beings are best understood as being risk-averse when making a decision that offers hope of a gain but risk-seeking when making a decision that will lead to a certain loss. In a stroke they provided a framework to understand all sorts of human behavior that economists, athletic coaches, and other “experts” have trouble explaining: why people who play the lottery also buy insurance; why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).’

    Billy Beane’s marriage has broken up, he sees his daughter Casey regularly and, at the end of one of their meetings, the girl, accompanying herself on a guitar, sings a touching little song which I discover online is ‘The Show’ by an Australian artist called Lenka.  The moment is so piercing that you feel the song has to be reprised and it is, at the very end of the film – when Billy is considering the Red Sox offer and listening to Casey’s tape in his car (there’s an implication that one of his reasons for turning down the Red Sox job is to allow him to stay geographically closer to his daughter).   In this reprise the lyric includes a substitution of Lenka’s:  Casey’s voice repeatedly sings, with affectionate sadness, ‘You’re such a loser, Dad’.  Moneyball is the story of a sporting triumph the man behind which turns into another of his failures.  It’s about having a loser mentality in two senses:  the actual losses are what Billy remembers most keenly; even when he and the team achieve an actual success, he has the capacity for seeing it differently.

    From quite an early stage, Billy imposes himself as such a convincing character that, while we anticipate a change in fortunes for the Oakland Athletics, we can’t expect a personality change in him.   This supplies the film with a sustained tension.  Billy knows he’s a jinx.  In the game in which his team goes for the record twentieth win on the trot, the Athletics are leading the Kansas City Royals 11-0 after the third inning.   Billy has been determined not to watch the game but, when he learns that the team looks home and dry, he’s persuaded (by Casey – on the phone) to go and watch.  He turns his car and the game around; he enters the stadium for the fourth inning and sees the advantage whittled away.  Almost anyone who’s a sports fan (certainly anyone who’s a fan of a sport where the final score is all) will be able to empathise – the improbable romp home stalled, the turn of the tide impossible to stop …  Billy goes to earth in the bowels of the stadium and he eventually hears a sound – a miraculous one.  Scott Hatteberg, one of his new recruits, hits a walk-off home run that ends the game with the Oakland Athletics winning 12-11.   This is a wonderful sequence.

    Moneyball is Bennett Miller’s first film since Capote (2005).  In that picture, he had a strong, dramatically exciting story but he also showed – for example, in the social meetings of Truman Capote and Harper Lee with the local sheriff and his wife – an intriguing ability to impart edgy rhythm and complexity to a situation that wasn’t, on the face of it, a tense or dramatic one.  The same thing happens here – not just in the sporting climaxes (and anti-climaxes), which are a gift to any director worth their salt, but in, for example, Billy’s visit to his ex-wife Sharon and her new partner Alan.  The increasingly uncomfortable rhythms of this encounter are compelling:  Sharon’s affable distance from Billy declines into brittle antipathy towards him.   Spike Jonze, in an uncredited cameo as Alan, is beautifully alert to these changes in atmosphere and Robin Wright’s emotional precision as Sharon was remarkable to see less than a week after her vague acting in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  (The presence of Wright in both movies isn’t the only cross-over between Bennett Miller and David Fincher that you’re reminded of here.   Steven Zaillian wrote the script for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Aaron Sorkin the screenplay for Fincher’s previous film The Social Network.  Brad Pitt starred in the one before that, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.)  The casting of Moneyball is first rate throughout, as is Miller’s direction of the actors.  Those in the relatively minor roles of Oakland Athletics players and scouts are strongly individual.  They include, among many others, Adrian Bellani, Stephen Bishop and Ken Medlock.

    I didn’t get a clear picture of the relationship of the Athletics’ coach Art Howe to the players – perhaps that’s unnecessary for a North American audience but being deprived of any sense of Howe’s reaction to the team’s record-breaking winning run is frustrating.  Otherwise, the screenplay is hard to fault.   It’s no surprise that, with Aaron Sorkin’s name on it, this is the best script since The Social Network – well structured and abounding in incisively fluent, witty, slangy dialogue.  Billy Beane was a promising player who didn’t fulfil his assumed potential on the field and became a general manager rather than, which is more usual, a team coach.   Sorkin and Zaillian include enough about Billy’s younger days to tell us all we need to know – but the flashbacks are rationed.  This is a deft way of suggesting that Billy is someone who doesn’t allow himself to dwell on the past.

    The scenes between him and his daughter (Kerrin Dorsey) are particular highlights.  With Casey, Billy is working hard not to be emotionally exposed – not just in reaction to that song but when he’s scared that she’s worried about him and he tries to smile her worry away.  We often see that Billy is angry (he kicks and throws things) although we rarely hear him raising his voice. Because only we see him in private, we become aware of his solitude.  Brad Pitt is a revelation.  One keeps being told that he really can act – the evidence was there in bits of Babel and fewer bits of The Tree of Life.  Pitt proves it now in a leading role in a more than two-hour film.  The voice sounds throttled, a little impersonal – it subtly expresses Billy’s isolation.  Pitt shows no condescension towards the man he’s playing – he stretches himself as an actor to create a personality that’s complex and intransigent.  What’s more, he achieves this without being cast obviously against type, or appearing in physical disguise, or having a disability or a mental breakdown.  When Billy is doing deals on the phone, it helps to have Pitt executing the conventional sporting (and business) deal gestures of triumph.   Yet defeat hangs around Billy Beane and because Brad Pitt is incarnating him the effect is rather mysterious.

    Pitt is splendidly partnered by Jonah Hill as Peter Brand.  When they’re high-fiving each other it’s great because Pitt is so cut out for doing this kind of thing and Hill is so not.  The scene in which Brand has to tell a high-profile player he’s off the team is as gripping as it’s funny.  Although Pitt looks in good shape and Billy is only seven years older than one of the veteran players he signs to the team, he’s clearly – and poignantly – a man whose time as an athlete is behind him.  As Art Howe, Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t look as if he ever was an athlete (Howe was).  As usual, though, Hoffman uses his bulk, as well as every other part of his acting equipment, to create a remarkably complete characterisation.

    5 January 2012

    [1] Wikipedia defines ‘on base percentage’ (OBP) as ‘a measure of how often a batter reaches base for any reason other than a fielding error, fielder’s choice, dropped/uncaught third strike, fielder’s obstruction, or catcher’s interference (the latter two are ignored as either times-on-base (TOB) or plate appearances in calculating OBP)’.

    [2] http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112

     

  • The Big Short

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Adam McKay (2015)

    The ‘short’ in the title means ‘bet against’.  The bet in question is that the US housing market, based on unstable subprime loans, will collapse in the second quarter of 2007.  In other words, the big short proved a winning bet on a spectacular scale for the punters concerned, while the housing market collapse meant ruin and misery for millions of others, in America and across the world.  Eccentric hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is the first to read the financial runes.  Others who get in on the act include:  Mark Baum (Steve Carell), the manager of a small investment bank, and his team there (Hamish Linklater, Rafe Spall and Jeremy Strong); a pair of ambitious rookie traders (John Magaro and Finn Wittrock); and Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), a retired Wall Street trader whom the rookies persuade to mentor them.   Also at the heart of the story, and our narrator, is Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling).  He’s a bond salesman at Deutsche Bank.  Vennett gets wind of Burry’s calculations and decides to short something called collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), even though Deutsche Bank is part of the CDO business.  Most of these characters are based on real-life financiers whose names have been changed.  The screenplay, by the director Adam McKay and Charles Rudolph, is based on Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, published in 2010.  (Lewis is also the author of the non-fiction books on which The Blind Side and Moneyball were based.)  The Big Short isn’t a likeable film but it’s an interesting one.  Both these qualities are largely the result of a correlation between the canny, unscrupulous behaviour of the main characters in the movie and the wiseguys who made it.

    We know what will happen in The Big Short.  We may know before we sit down in the cinema; even if we don’t, Jared Vennett tells us within a couple of minutes of the start.  Adam McKay and his brilliant editor, Hank Corwin, succeed in creating a prevailing tempo that’s right for a get-richer-quick story and gives that story the semblance of suspense.  The genius of the fast-talking, catch-us-if-you-can financial world is there too in the high-speed witty dialogue of McKay and Charles Randolph’s script.  Most of the dramatis personae are thin albeit lively caricatures of types but the screenplay supplies more detail on the personalities of two of the principals.  Michael Burry, a qualified medical doctor, is not only a financial maverick but also a social loner, closed off from others since childhood by a glass eye and what looks like Asperger’s syndrome.  Mark Baum seems conscientious to a fault.  As a boy, he was, in his rabbi’s judgment, an excellent student of the Talmud except that he kept looking for contradictions in it.  As a middle-aged man, Mark is trying and failing to come to terms with the recent suicide of his brother.  It’s clever to give this backstory in just a couple of cases.  It means there are people whose relative depth (it is only relative) can be aligned with the movie’s change of register in its closing stages.  The Big Short is, for the most part, exuberantly sarcastic but it’s no surprise when, in due course, it tries to sound more seriously regretful about ‘ordinary’ people paying for the economic meltdown in 2007-08 and about the banks getting away with it.

    The performances of Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling reflect the spirit of the film-making and, in the latter’s case, the spirit of financial opportunism too.  Bale’s acting is perfectly aligned with the structure of The Big Short.  His hyper-naturalistic playing has, to start with, the showoff quality that we’ve come to expect from him.  His line readings and physical mannerisms amount to an accomplished turn.  In the last few years at least, Bale has turned into an actor who, if he’s not grandstanding (The Fighter, American Hustle), is dead on the screen (The Dark Knight, Public Enemies).  In The Big Short, however, he eventually achieves something quieter and more reflective without becoming a blank.  I think it’s Bale’s best work so far (his best, at least, since his movie debut as the boy hero of Empire of the Sun).  Ryan Gosling – well described by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker as ‘a lizard with sideburns’ in this role – makes a return to form, after his dull work in The Place Beyond the Pines and Gangster Squad (and Lost River, his mauled debut as a writer-director).  Gosling is admirably crisp and precise.  His apparent effortlessness functions as an expression of contempt for the well-groomed, miasmic creature that he’s playing – it’s not worth working too hard to embody Jared Vennett.

    What Ryan Gosling achieves here – a paradoxical combination of incisiveness and superficiality – seems to be what Adam McKay’s direction is after most of the time, and often delivers.  It’s also a main reason why McKay’s shift in tone late on isn’t convincing.  In his concluding narration, Vennett tells us that those responsible for malpractice in the financial industry were brought to book and punished in the aftermath of the crash.  As the audience’s jaw starts to drop, Vennett says, ‘Only kidding’.  The film’s closing legends, as well as summarising what happened next to the main characters in the story, explains that next to no one went to prison for the scandals The Big Short has described and that CDOs are already back in business.  You can’t help suspecting that Adam McKay, in professing regret for those whose lives were wrecked by the market collapse and suggesting that their winning bet disillusioned most of the big shorters, is only kidding too – as a film-maker if not as a human being.  McKay’s direction is very pleased with itself: the movie lives off pace and slickness from which that but-seriously-now interlude detracts.

    Very early in the film, I wondered how I was going to cope with what was already a heavy load of financial information that I found incomprehensible and, in itself, uninteresting.  Adam McKay and Charles Randolph realise this is how much of the audience is liable to react.  They soon have Jared Vennett explicitly acknowledge the fact and introduce ‘Margot Robbie in a bubble bath’ to help us out.  Margot Robbie duly appears to explain, between sips from a glass of champagne, some of the jargon we’ve heard and that the crucial thing to remember, whenever we hear the word ‘subprime’, is that ‘it means shit’.  Robbie’s appearance in The Big Short makes a kind of a sense because she first came to many filmgoers’ attention through her role in The Wolf of Wall Street.  But she’s not the only celebrity to appear in McKay’s film as herself and, if there’s a similar aptness to the ‘casting’ of these others, I didn’t get it.  The chef Anthony Bourdain appears in his kitchen to draw an analogy between making a gourmet dish out of leftovers and the make-up of CDOs (collections of poor loans packaged together and given inappropriate triple-A ratings by conflicted-cum-dishonest financial rating agencies).  Later on, the pop singer Selena Gomez is part of a casino double act with the academic Richard Thaler, a behavioural finance theorist.  (I get why he’s in the movie though I’m not sure if he counts as a celebrity.)  These cameos are another example of the connection between the people on the screen and the man behind the camera.  Jared Vennett, in presenting the celebs, functions as a master of ceremonies and thus as proxy for Adam McKay:  Robbie et al wouldn’t be there if the director hadn’t asked them.  Vennett’s breaking the fourth wall to address the viewer is the main but not the only way in which The Big Short steps outside itself for jocose explanatory purposes.  The use of orientating news film and text defining further terms in the financial trader’s vocabulary are predictable enough; less so is an anatomical illustration on the screen that accompanies an explanation by Rafe Spall’s character to his colleagues of the problems of epididimitis.

    Steve Carell’s speciality is blending humour and humanity – that was true, in a bizarre sense, even of his characterisation in Foxcatcher.  Mark Baum is more familiar territory for him yet Carell gets to new emotional places in this role.  As well as often being funny, he expresses a hectic, claustrophobic anguish that goes further than the description of Baum, by one of his colleagues, as unhappy when he’s not unhappy.  Because Steve Carell’s Mark Baum is so thoroughly miserable, his sense of defeat at making vast amounts of money from the housing collapse is more convincing than, for example, the disillusionment of the greenhorn traders.  It’s not the fault of the actors concerned that this irony feels contrived.  As the pair’s adviser, Brad Pitt has the advantage of playing a character with an already well-developed understanding of the chicanery of the world in which he’s made his living.  Pitt’s reserve and stillness are an effective counterpoint to the spiel and speed of the more typical specimens on display in The Big Short.   The cast is strong throughout but, in what’s presented as a man’s world, three actresses register more strongly than the actors in smaller roles:  Marisa Tomei, in her few scenes as Mark Baum’s sympathetic wife;  Adepero Oduye, as a banker colleague of Baum’s; and, especially, Melissa Leo, in a scintillating cameo as a credit rating agency executive.

    What makes the film entertaining to watch may also be part of what’s made it, in my case, quickly forgettable.   But only part:  I’m a financial imbecile too.  I did as Margot Robbie instructed but keeping in mind that sub-prime and shit were synonyms was the extent of my understanding of the money stuff.  I left the cinema trying to remember if the three-word name of a crucial product in the plot was mortgage … security … bonds.   Even if it is, getting the words in my head was as far as I could go:  their meaning was beyond me.

    25 January 2016

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