Baseball, perhaps the most American of all sports, has served up the basis for many films from Bill Durham to The Love Of The Game. It seems to encapsulate all the positive attributes of the American dream, the underdog who overcomes insurmountable odds with a band of seeming
outsiders.

This concept serves the backbone of Moneyball, an adaptation of a factual account, penned by Michael Lewis, of the Oakland Athletics unorthodox rise to baseball history in the season of 2002. It is directed by Bennet Miller who has waited six years since his critically acclaimed debut Capote to pick up the directing reins again. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, a former player whose young hopes have long been dashed, is now the Oakland’s manager fighting a losing battle against teams with more funds at their disposal and as a result better players. A chance encounter with a Yale economics graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) presents Beane with an unusual solution; using a statistics model drawn up by Brand, Beane plans to recruit players whose skills are undervalued due to trivial reasons such as age and personal habits, signing them up within the team’s limited budget. Together Beane and Brand stand by their actions despite the theory being untested and the growing disapproval of the veteran members of management and the existing team members lead by Captain Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Can they overcome the odds and earn the respect of their comrades? Take a guess…

Lewis’ account has been adapted by Aaron Sorkin, best known for television milestone The West Wing and last year’s award heavyweight The Social Network. If you’re familiar with Sorkin’s work then you know the score; machine gun speed dialogue, razor sharp wit and facts and figures fired out with such pace and panache the audience have no choice but to keep up and stay there. The sense of audience participation is confirmed with the heavy use of jargon and the refusal to stop the action to define what everything means. Anyone unfamiliar with baseball (including myself) may initially find these scenes impenetrable though the refusal to talk down to the audience grabs attention and creates an engagement with such scenes. The best parts of Moneyball play to these strengths very well indeed. Pitt and Hill’s scenes together spark with a playful yet mature weight to them; they deliver the jargon heavy dialogue with tremendous energy and verve whilst still finding room to inject humour and character development. An actor who in my opinion often swerves between excellent and bland quite erratically, Pitt is thankfully on quite excellent form here. He portrays the weary and bitter part of Beane’s personality very well, his sudden outbursts of anger coming out of left field and sending up the idea of a performer who must keep a grinning handsome face on an incredibly unstable empire. Hill in particular is extremely charming in a role that requires him to bypass the bawdy, frat boy style of humour that has marked out his film roles so far. It’s a classic fish out of water style role braced with moments of surprising dramatic clarity such as a brilliant moment when Pitt jokingly guides him through the tactics of firing players before ordering him to do it for real. It marks what hopefully will prove to be an exciting period in his career.
Director Miller takes the unusual and quite effective idea of taking us away from the pitch to focus on the background details of the sport. Beane refuses to watch matches in person fearing he may jinx the outcome so all of the actual playing for the most part of the film the game of baseball itself is confined to archive footage, televisions playing quietly in the corner and snatched radio reports. Miller sticks to the boardrooms, the changing rooms, offices and corridors of the stadium framing the characters within a world of closed in interior spaces juxtaposing against the wide open playing fields of the game. The film is shot by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s regular cinematographer, bringing a surprisingly cinematic feel to the back room proceedings including one elegant tracking shot that follows Pitt from his office through the various hallways to the dressing room. Accompanied by a minimal yet stirring score by Mychael Danna, such scenes take on a fascinating edge providing a glimpse of a world that most sports based movies choose to ignore.

Yet as the action wears on the cracks begin to appear within Moneyball’s own formula. Compared with the astonishing pace of some of Sorkin’s previous material, there are moments when the action does unfortunately drag. The first two thirds spend too much time on the resistance Beane faces from his fellow team members and management. Such scenes do allow the incidental pleasure such as Pitt locking horns with Seymour Hoffman, Hoffman comfortably holding onto his title as one of America’s great character actors. Yet there are also distractions such as scenes touching on Beane’s relationship with his ex-wife (a wasted Robin Wright) and daughter. Clearly meant to cement the emotional connection with Pitt’s character but that has already been established in the scenes portraying his regret and disappointment with the game. It does manage to wring out an amusing cameo from Spike Jonze as Pitt’s spineless romantic replacement but the whole framing device feels rushed and forced and in the case of a wrap round sing-a-long narrative device, overly sentimental and a tad trite. Unfortunately Miller also looses confidence in his approach to the material as the third act succumbs to the obvious clichés that it had previously managed to steer clear of. The traditional turning of the tide montage is certainly to be expected but the last minute decision of Beane to attend a crucial game and watch it live is a step too far. We know exactly what to expect as players make their final, desperate stand against the odds and attain glory and this sudden ham-fisted finale can’t help but feel like a betrayal of what has gone before it. Some may argue that Miller and Sorkin manage to retain a bittersweet outlook of the closing scenes but for my money the damage had been irrevocably done.

How exactly a film about such a particularly American subject will be embraced here in the United Kingdom is uncertain. The sheer slew of information and sometimes sluggish is a barrier that may limit its appeal outside the State’s but Pitt’s charisma, Hill’s charm and the verve of many of the early scenes do make Moneyball a worthy if somewhat drawn out watch.