Review #377: 'Moneyball' (2011)

Being a football fan (that's 'soccer' to any Americans reading), it has been an increasingly frustrating past decade or so seeing the sport turn into a greedy, money-orientated business. The gap between the rich super-clubs, and the smaller teams that have been forced into becoming 'feeder clubs', is becoming larger and larger with every progressing season. The takeover of Manchester City a few seasons ago by Arab oil tycoon and politician Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nayhan saw the club spend over £150 million in one transfer window, and now sit second in the league as a result, with a host of superstar playboys littering their team-sheet. This transformation from sport of the working classes to a capitalist business is the focus of Moneyball, but the sport is baseball, America's equivalent to football.

It tells the true story of failed baseball player Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who is now General Manager of Oakland Athletics, a team who are struggling to keep up with the pace of the New York Mets, a rich club who have just nabbed three of Oakland's key players. Disillusioned with the financial distance between the clubs, he approaches Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale-graduated economics analyst who seems to have made a breakthrough studying statistics rather than player valuation. Brand suggests three out-of-favour has-beens and rejects to replace one of the superstars they lost, to which Beane obliges. Oakland become the laughing stock of the sport, until they go on a winning run which will soon break all baseball records.

Like I said, I am a football fan, and I love to watch the game. But my love of the game is hampered by feelings of self-loathing as I watch these over-paid primadonnas whine and dive their way around the pitch, while earning more in a week than I will in twenty years for kicking a piece of leather around a pitch for 90 minutes. Billy Beans shares this view. He says 'it's impossible not to be romantic about baseball', but he has watched the sport he loves become merely dollar signs in the eyes of suit-wearing tycoons who treat it as something to play with in their spare time. Beane does not want to simply win a trophy, a ring, or a record, he wants to change the way the game is run.

Pitt became involved in the production way back in 2007, and became almost a labour-of-love for the actor. He also produces as well as giving an impressive performance. It's alarming how he has transformed himself from a mere pretty boy of the 1990's, into a passionate actor and producer, starring in excellent films such as Babel (2006), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Inglourious Basterds (2009). He received an Oscar nomination for this film, as it's fully deserved, portraying Beane as a mixture of determination, eagerness and concern, as well short-tempered rage. Jonah Hill is also excellent, following his creepy performance in Cyrus (2010) as the dutiful, super-intelligent Brand (he also received an Oscar nomination).

Moneyball is a welcome passion project that goes as far as translating the love of a sport that escapes us Brits. Although there is very little focus on the playing of the sport itself, it makes it clear why the sport is loved so much and is seen in such a romantic light. It does for baseball what the underrated Friday Night Lights (2004) does for American football. The script by superscribes Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin is suitably fast-paced and complex, giving the film a weight and a darkness that made The Social Network (2010) so good (in Sorkin's case). Informative, insightful, and occasionally gripping, UK audiences should not shy away from this film due to the sport, and instead embrace a film that tackles larger issues of greed and class division.


Directed by: Bennett Miller
Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie