I’m finding it pretty hard to talk about Moneyball and not bring up one of last year’s most successful films The Social Network. So instead of running away from that instinct, I’ll just get it out of the way right here at the beginning. The Social Network was a marvel in how it took inherently dry material about coding and Internet startups and made them hum through slick presentation and by thematically tying the less than interesting parts of the film to an interesting protagonist. Moneyball tries to use the same tricks to breath some life into the subject of baseball statistics. The problem is, it’s slightly lesser than The Social Network in every respect, so it ends up looking like a pretender.
Both films share a screenwriter in Aaron Sorkin, and the rhythm of the dialogue feels very familiar, but Moneyball lacks a subject as uniquely complex as that film’s Mark Zuckerberg character. The music is reminiscent of the muted tones of Trent Reznor’s Social Network score, but it doesn’t quite have the touch of being implemented by such a unique artist. Visually, while this film is competently put together by director Bennett Miller, it lacks the virtuoso touch of a David Fincher, who elevated his material an immeasurable degree with his keen eye and technical wizardry. The Social Network crafted a gorgeous, modern aesthetic that felt like an entirely new experience. Moneyball often feels like you’re watching a documentary; it’s all shots of computer spreadsheets and TV broadcasts of baseball games. Moneyball gets an A for effort when it comes to being the first film to try and capitalize on The Social Network’s success, but ultimately it just comes off as a second rate clone.
Its biggest problem is that it tries to replace the Zuckerberg character with ex-player and current GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt). As the story goes, Beane is in charge of the down on their luck Oakland Athletics, a team who only has a player budget of about $40 million a year, a far cry from the New York Yankee’s $126 million. Because of this he has to find a new way to compete that doesn’t involve negotiating for the best players. That opportunity comes when he meets a young guy named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an Ivy league graduate who has perfected a way of crunching baseball stats to reveal which players are most undervalued. Brand’s method of reducing men to numbers leads him to believe that there is a way to cobble together a championship team for only $40 million, and with Beane’s blessing they’re off to the races. Pitt and Hill are really good together, Pitt playing a snorting, spitting alpha male and Hill a timid, chubbier Woody Allen type. Their banter back and forth (helped along by Sorkin dialogue) is the thing that works best, and both men were perfectly cast in the roles. The problem is that the film focuses on the wrong character.
What is the point of all the chewing and spitting and eating that Pitt does as Beane? It seemed to me to be Pitt going big with the character, trying to justify all of the focus and screen time he was getting. We get myriad flashbacks to Beane’s past, when he was first starting out a promising career as a young player. We spend a lot of time with Beane and his daughter, who he has a good relationship with despite being divorced to her mother, and despite being distant to everyone else. It’s all meant to inform the rest of the story. Beane is desperate to try a new way of putting together a baseball team because his team is floundering and his past failure as a hot prospect who didn’t pan out in the majors is still haunting him. He’s desperate to keep his job because relocation would mean being sent away from his daughter and robbing him of the one strong relationship in his life. That’s all well and good, but Beane wasn’t the interesting character in this movie. The interesting character was Brand, and we get no glimpse into his personal life whatsoever.
The crux of this story is the new method of buying players based not on looks and potential, but on pure statistical performance. It’s Brand who spent who knows how long crunching all of these numbers and playing out experiments to prove them. What is it about his personality that lead him to looking at the world purely in terms of numbers? Why did he channel his obsession with statistics into baseball? Why is he the first person to approach the game in this way in its well over a century of history? These questions not only don’t get answered, they’re never asked. Brand is treated as a plot point, a way for Beane to prove everyone wrong and show that he’s not a loser. But Beane is just the guy who got desperate enough to throw a hail mary; Brand created something new. He’s the Zuckerberg of this movie. So why are we focused on one of the Winklevoss twins trying to ride his coattails?
Another big issue is the pacing. Moneyball is way too long. With appropriate cuts you could get rid of a good half hour and still have the story. There’s a half hour alone where we just watch a back and forth between Beane and A’s manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Beane tells Howe that his system needs certain players put in certain positions, but Howe refuses to comply and the team ends up losing. Over and over again. It seemed like they were trying to extend the losing streak section of the As’ season to amp up the drama, but seeing as this film was covering very recent, very popular history, it was a wasted effort. Everyone who sees this movie will know that things turn around for the team going in. Spending so much time building up the will they/won’t they suspense was time wasted. And then, once the team turns things around, Howe disappears from the film completely, his antagonistic relationship with Beane never resolved. Like Brand, he is a plot point to get Beane’s story where it needs to be more so than a character, and that’s a huge waste of a talent like Hoffman.
The structure is strange too, and not in a good way. The whole movie builds up the question of whether or not the As will make it to the World Series, but then the big game doesn’t end up being the climax of the film. The big game gets glossed over and a contract negotiation that comes out of nowhere becomes the real climax. And then the conflict of this negotiation is solved about two minutes later by the means of a too on the nose, too cheesy song that Pitt’s daughter sings. He’s wrestling with big life decisions, but then they get nicely wrapped up by song lyrics that make his choice for him and spell out the themes of the film for the audience. Meanwhile, that two hours we spent following the As’ 2002 season becomes a complete afterthought. The end of the film felt like a separate short film that got tacked on. And despite the fact that the big game where the As face elimination isn’t treated as the film’s climax, we do get a different, completely meaningless game earlier on that is treated as a false climax. There is this B-plot ongoing where Beane thinks that he is a jinx, and that if he watches a game in the stadium his team will lose. It’s put to the test in a big moment where he gets too excited to stay away and enters the stadium anyways. Immediately the team starts doing bad, they blow a big lead, and the entire game (and Beane’s existential crisis) comes down to one pitch, one big moment. The whole sequence wreaked of false drama, like the screenwriters realized this story had no big moment, so they tried their best to create one out of nothing. And it’s played so melodramatically; we get slow motion and audio dropouts, forcing us to linger in horrific silence. Come on, Miller. This is guys playing baseball, not the soldiers storming beaches in Saving Private Ryan. Your hand is too heavy.
Moneyball tells us over and over that it’s a film about a couple of revolutionaries bucking the system and blazing a new trail. But it never shows us that, it never makes us feel it. Beane and Brand don’t struggle to get their ideas past the old guard; Beane is in charge. He doesn’t have an owner questioning his every decision, the only people questioning him are his underlings. What that boils down to is a movie about a couple of guys who enact a plan and then sit back to see if it works or not. And then we watch them watching. That’s not my idea of excitement, and Beane’s personal struggles didn’t work well enough for me to make up for it. Pitt and Hill’s performances are fun enough to bump this up from failure to middling movie, but just barely.
