Dan in Reel Life sends this review to the plate.
Moneyball
In the film adaptation of the Michael Lewis best-selling book, Brad Pitt (The Mexican) stars as Billy Beane, general manager of Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics. Beane has a big problem: how to compete against rich large-market teams like New York and Boston with the limited funds of his small-market Oakland organization. Following an extremely successful (but non-championship) season, Beane can only watch helplessly while his marquee players are pillaged by wealthier teams during free agency. Unwilling to be satisfied with anything less than ‘winning the last game of the season’, he becomes increasingly convicted that the A’s will not win it all using the conventional wisdom of scouting and roster-building followed religiously for years in the big leagues.
While on a trip to Cleveland to deal for players to replace his lost stars, Beane notices that an extremely young, decidedly ‘non-baseball’ person named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, Superbad) is wielding tremendous influence in the Indians’ front office. Intrigued, he digs deeper and discovers that this Yale prodigy has a radical approach to evaluating baseball talent; instead of the long-utilized statistics combined with a sort of ‘baseball sixth sense’ usually employed by talent evaluators, Brand’s method is based almost exclusively on the quantitative conclusions drawn from his studies of economics and statistics. Sensing that Brand’s unorthodox thinking could be the new philosophy he needs to compete with the big guys, Beane hires Brand away from Cleveland and bets the farm on his approach.
As surely as people hate change, Beane encounters resistance from within and without the organization as he makes drastic moves to implement Brand’s unconventional strategies. As his character attempts to navigate this turmoil, Pitt’s trademark charisma pulls you in and quickly has you rooting for Beane’s success. The mentor/mentoree scenes with Beane and Brand are all memorable as Hill plays off of Pitt perfectly. The trials and tribulations of the inexperienced Brand are relatable to anyone who’s endured a bruising post-college encounter with the ‘real world’. Watching the initially hesitant Brand, suddenly plucked from cubicle-ville and promoted to assistant GM, come of age as a baseball front-office professional under Beane’s tutelage is a large part of the fun of this movie as well.
In Beane’s refusal to accept mediocre small-market standards for success we see inspiring hope for the little guy. This movie is a home run, go see it.