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