Moneyball | Little White Lies

Mon­ey­ball

25 Nov 2011 / Released: 25 Nov 2011

Words by Dan Stewart

Directed by Bennett Miller

Starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Robin Wright

A man with long hair wearing a dark jacket seated in stadium seats on a baseball field.
A man with long hair wearing a dark jacket seated in stadium seats on a baseball field.
2

Anticipation.

Statistics and baseball? Might raincheck this one.

5

Enjoyment.

Sorkin and Pitt smash it out of the park.

4

In Retrospect.

A seasoned, mature picture right out of left-field.

Ben­nett Miller and Aaron Sorkin com­bine for the best film about sta­tis­tics you’re ever like­ly to see.

Is there any­thing more Amer­i­can than base­ball? Along with apple pie, root beer and cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, a good old-fash­ioned ball game is enough to bring tears to the eyes of any free­dom-lov­ing Yank.

For us Brits, though, those tears are like­ly to be shed in utter bore­dom. Luck­i­ly, Mon­ey­ball is about base­ball in the same way that The Social Net­work – with which it shares a cer­tain screen­writer – is about web devel­op­ment. Even if you don’t know a fly ball from a curve ball, this is grip­ping dra­ma, both for its clas­sic under­dog-makes-good sto­ry and also for what it has to say about mod­ern America.

Based on Michael Lewis’ best­seller, Mon­ey­ball tells the real-life sto­ry of how Major League Base­ball team the Oak­land A’s upset the game’s odds in the 2001 – 2002 sea­son. Frus­trat­ed at how eas­i­ly the MLB’s big fran­chis­es out­spent his mid-size team, the A’s gen­er­al man­ag­er Bil­ly Beane (Brad Pitt) hires young, inex­pe­ri­enced econ­o­mist Peter Brand (Jon­ah Hill) to rethink the team’s approach to the game.

Using sta­tis­ti­cal mod­els, the pair iden­ti­fy under­val­ued play­ers with over­looked strengths and put togeth­er an under­dog team (an island of mis­fit toys,” Brand calls them) to com­pete with their monied rivals.

The film’s pro­duc­tion team was almost as dif­fi­cult to put togeth­er. Steven Soder­bergh orig­i­nal­ly planned to make it as a doc­u­men­tary, but was replaced by Capote direc­tor Ben­nett Miller after pro­duc­ers decid­ed it would work bet­ter as a drama.

Aaron Sorkin was then hired to re-tool Steven Zaillian’s orig­i­nal script. To use a base­ball term, that was a good trade. With its sti­fling, num­bers-based premise, Mon­ey­ball could have been extreme­ly dry stuff. But in Sorkin’s hands, it becomes a sports-based com­pan­ion piece to The Social Network.

Just as that film uses Face­book to rumi­nate on friend­ship and the nature of cre­ativ­i­ty, so Mon­ey­ball uses base­ball to tell a sto­ry of mas­culin­i­ty, lead­er­ship and Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Beane becomes a sym­bol of the team’s fad­ing glo­ries, a mid­dle-aged man des­per­ate to turn back the years and stand toe to toe with oppo­nents who con­sid­er him a spent force.

Draw­ing upon his movie-star charis­ma to give Beane a intim­i­dat­ing, Type‑A man­ner, producer/​star Pitt grad­u­al­ly shades it with gruff pater­nal­ism as his play­ers begin show­ing their worth. It’s a sub­tle, human per­for­mance that ranks up there with his finest.

Christo­pher Nolan’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Wal­ly Pfis­ter invests the film with some star­tling­ly beau­ti­ful images – a Stars and Stripes slow­ly being unrav­eled on a fresh­ly mown pitch, a base­ball arc­ing over sta­di­um lights into a catcher’s mitt – while Miller guides us through the nar­ra­tive twists and sta­tis­ti­cal cul-de-sacs of the sto­ry with dexterity.

But Sorkin’s con­tri­bu­tion is the key to the movie’s suc­cess, using the clas­sic nar­ra­tive arc of the sports dra­ma to paint America’s Nation­al Pas­time in mut­ed reds, whites and blues. It’s the best film about sta­tis­tics you’re ever like­ly to see.

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