‘Treats its audience like adults’: why Moneyball is my feelgood movie

3 hours ago 12

The older I get, the more I want to hear people talk. I want films in which recognisably human characters interact in recognisably human ways. No one need die; nothing great need be at stake. I just want to be treated like an adult. Moneyball treats its audience like adults.

Though it was released in 2011, it’s a very 1970s film: its theme is analogous to the paranoid thrillers of that decade. In Moneyball, an American institution is in the hands of an elite, and a lone man who doesn’t trust the system is trying to change things. Yes, it’s about baseball rather than the CIA, but I don’t think it’s coincidence that this is the film where Brad Pitt finally looked like the inheritor to Robert Redford.

Moneyball is proof that when you put good actors with a good script, so long as the director doesn’t go off the deep end, you’ll end up with something decent. It’s unflashy: its sports action sequences are rare – and wisely so, given that actors pretending to play professional sport is routinely an embarrassment. It’s talky: it demands that you listen to what’s being said, but makes it easy to comprehend. And it is endlessly rewatchable: the perfect plane movie, insomnia movie, sick day movie.

Pitt plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, the poorest team in baseball. The film asks (and this may be the least promising setup ever for a major Hollywood movie) how can data analysis detect unrecognised value in baseball players, as a means to counter economic inequality between teams? Somehow screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, alongside director Bennett Miller, turned that into a very human drama.

They were helped by career-best performances from Pitt, putting his usual preening self-glorification to one side – because Beane is, if not a loser, then certainly not a winner: a failed major league player and the GM for a struggling team – and from Jonah Hill. The Superbad star plays a composite called Peter Brand, largely based on Beane’s former assistant Paul DePodesta, and it’s his job to both give Pitt a foil and to explain the science: think of him as Margot Robbie in the bathtub in The Big Short. He does so without any of his usual mania: a kid thrown in at the deep end, realising the responsibility he now has.

We need someone to explain the science because it’s a Michael Lewis adaptation, and one of the particular pleasures of Lewis’s writing is his breathless gallop through complex facts in a way that makes complete sense, even if nothing sticks for more than 30 seconds. If you don’t do the science, you end up with The Blind Side: a book about how changes in football tactics encouraged the structural exploitation of a particular physical type of young Black man, which became a film about how wonderful Sandra Bullock took in a poor Black kid and helped him become a football star.

But if you do too much science, you end up with The Big Short. Compelling as it is – and Pitt obviously fancied another swing at Lewis material – it’s only about the science: it asks us to treat as our heroes the people who made themselves unfathomably rich from the economic suffering of ordinary Americans. You can’t feel for anyone in The Big Short, but Moneyball has a very human centre. You want Pitt, Hill and their oddball team – a notable early role for Chris Pratt as the unconventional and insecure pitcher Scott Hatteberg – to win. You feel for both sides: the old scouts who insist you can assess a player on style, and Pitt and Hill insisting on facts, You feel, especially, for coach Art Howe – played sourly by Philip Seymour Hoffman – seeing all his agency taken from him by Pitt.

Moneyball messes around with the facts but not too badly. Its one misstep is a saccharine and needless side-plot that exists purely to show Beane cares about the daughter of his failed marriage (I’m not sure if it’s a pleasure for us, or an insult to her, that Robin Wright crops up for scant moments as his ex). But even in the family moments there are little barbs: when Wright’s new husband tries to talk about baseball and both Pitt and Wright correct his pronunciation of a name. At first sight, it’s like a bond they have that he will never share; think a little longer and you realise Wright knows this because she heard nothing but baseball in her marriage, not because she’s a fan.

And best of all, there’s no happy ending. The A’s don’t win the World Series. Beane gets offered the biggest job in baseball and turns it down, which to sports fans was the most enigmatic moment of the whole Moneyball story. Was he loyal to the A’s? Or too afraid to leave his own little empire behind? At least this film leaves us to wonder.