Filmbook: "Moneyball" (2011)

One of the reasons book people hold books above the movies based on them is a matter of complexity. The effective delivery of information simply looks different on page and onscreen, and a wholly moderate level of exposition can be overwhelming when transferred to images or dialogue. It's probably for the best that the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' MONEYBALL largely glosses over the statistics the book labors to explain, because it brings across the sense of them fairly well. It's the simplification of the themes that gets this movie in trouble.

"Moneyball" chronicles the end of the Oakland A's 2001 season and the 2002 season, as general manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) struggles to implement a new system for finding the best players to fill out his roster. Beane decides to do this after losing three of his best players, losing a close postseason series and failing to get more money from the team owner --  and hires a young econ major from Yale (Jonah Hill) who recommends players based on generating wins for the team, not simply standout stats on their own. Everyone thinks Beane is crazy (including his manager, who resists implementing his ideas about who ought to play and in what order) and the A's seem to start the season proving that this new approach will never work. Then... they start winning.

The sense I got when I read MONEYBALL was that Beane and his right-hand man Paul DePodesta (fictionalized in this movie in Hill's character -- also, I notice he works for the Mets now, so good luck with that!) were the young, brash new guys trying to come up with a solution to an old problem, unafraid to fail. This is preserved in the movie, but with an added layer of emotional conflict wherein Beane's sabermetrics approach could destroy the game of baseball as we know it -- and when he decides to implement that, it comes at a terrible price. There are soundbites from old men calling baseball "the children's game" (a phrase I had never heard before), romantic shots of empty stadia, and talk of the intangibles that will be jeopardized forever by the A's and their spreadsheets. Maybe this is meant to add resonance, but it just confused me when all other elements are pointing toward the heroic GM in his lonely weight room because he can't bear to watch his own team from the stands. It moves in the opposite direction from everything else. It all really comes to a head at the end of the movie, when Beane has to make a choice -- and I could feel the tug of a Big Emotional Moment, but it didn't move me at all. (And it didn't justify at all why he makes the choice he does.)

"Moneyball" was enjoyable enough, but not a standout movie for me, in part because I feel like this movie prodded me to root against my own self-interest. It's not as simple as calculator vs. heart,  because if it were, I wouldn't have been that interested in Beane's story in the first place, because my own personal connection to baseball stubbornly falls on one side of that line as long as we're falsely dichotomizing.

I'm not sure who to fault for this, given how labored over this project was before hitting the big screen. Director Bennett Miller brings some of the space and silence he used so well in "Capote" (along with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is slightly underused here as the A's manager) but gets caught up in scoring and underlining some of those moments he might have let lie. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was brought in in the middle, and snuck at least one walk-and-talk in there -- but he's hardly the only one to be bit by the mythology bug.

Would I have liked it better if Steven Soderbergh (who allegedly wanted to incorporate interviews from the real players rather than actors playing them, and why a studio would balk at that I have no idea) and screenwriter Steven Zaillian had stayed on? It's hard to say at this point. But "Moneyball" lacked something for me -- maybe one of those intangibles it is claimed will be lost should its hero get what he wants.

Filmbook verdict: Read the book, maybe see the movie.