TIFF ‘11: Moneyball review
After slipping through the fingers of several writers and directors over the last several years, the true-life tale of how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane transformed the game of baseball is finally about to hit the screen. The film tells the story of how after losing 3 of their key players, Beane hired a Yale-educated Economics major Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to employ mathematics in order to create a winning team. One of the things that even the most hardcore baseball fans seldomly discuss is that it’s not an even playing field. A team like the New York Yankees gets about 5x the budget as a team like the A’s to create their roster so how can all teams possibly be created equal?
Beane and Brand’s fight against the old guard may remind some of last year’s “The Social Network” so it should come as no surprise the script is co-written (along with Steve Zaillian) by ‘Network’ scribe Aaron Sorkin. It is a joy to watch the comic repoire between the megastar and Hill and their scenes together contain many of the film’s highlights. There are some great scenes with the duo facing off against the other older recruiters and you can feel the snap of his dialogue here. The only scenes that don’t seem to fit quite as well are the ones showing Beane’s home life. The scenes with his daughter are sweet and it’s great seeing Spike Jonze pop up for a cameo as his ex-wife’s (Robin Wright Penn) new husband but they feel like concessions.
The project has long been a passion of star/producer Pitt who has shepherded it through all the various incarnations. The actor seems like one of the last few megastars who hasn’t tried his hand at directing, instead he has his pick of the best directors in the world. Unfortunately for some of those directors his influence is more powerful than theirs and leaving a project (as he did to Darren Aronofsky twice on “The Fountain” and “The Fighter”) or not seeing eye to eye with a directors vision for the project can mean that he stays and the director goes. Steven Soderbergh was weeks away from shooting his version before Pitt pulled the plug because they had different visions about the project.
The Oscar-winning director had envisioned a more documentary approach to the film like Warren Beatty’s film “Reds,” interspersing real interviews with baseball players into the dramatized footage. Assumedly Pitt wanted more focus on his character and thus the family scenes feel a bit shoehorned in. Despite my curiosity about a version of the film we’ll never get to see, the MVP here is director Bennett Miller (“Capote”) who does a great job making what could have been a standard sports movie feel more like a character-driven drama. It’s a solid film, thoroughly entertaining, beautifully shot and one that baseball fans should enjoy.
