Moneyball Review

Moneyball Review

I am a huge fan of the Oakland A's. I am also a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin. So it would reason that, like peanut butter and chocolate (two great tastes, that taste great together) a movie about my favorite team coupled with a writer that I am also fond of would be nothing short of brilliant. Unfortunately, Moneyball falls short of brilliance and while it is a good movie it is not as entertaining or as factual as I would have liked.

In plain and simple terms, the success of last year's The Social Network

allowed this movie to be made. For those of you who are unfamiliar The Social Network was the "Facebook" movie. While partially about the creation of Facebook, the movie is really about one man's ego and search for power and the people he hurts along the way.

Moneyball is essentially the same film but replaces Facebook with baseball. Specifically it deals with behind the scenes baseball politics. It is a movie less about baseball and more about how owners put together a product. Some baseball teams are wealthy and put together fantastic teams with all star players. Some baseball teams put together modest clubs for modest funds. And then there is everyone else who put together teams with the leftovers. Moneyball is the system Beane created to get the most bang for his buck.

Whether you believe in the system or not doesn't matter to the movie, all you need to know is that he did it and this movie is about his struggles to get it accepted by those who refused to let go of the old ways. Personally I feel like Moneyball was a fabrication of the "steroid era." That most of his successful teams were juiced beyond compare, and that Beane was a "genius" at finding players who were desperate enough to cheat. But you don't read my blog to read about sports, so let's discuss the movie.

The movie is in a word uneven. It is smart, well written and clever. It is also dull and lifeless. The performances are really the only reason to see the movie. Every actor in their role is brilliant, each member of the cast does really become that character. Director Bennet Miller gets one of Brad Pitts most mature and interesting performances as Beane. He also does a brilliant job of coaxing a unique performance out of Jonah Hill. Hill was in danger of being typecast as the slacker character, and hopefully this opens new doors to him.

Basically, Moneyball is a movie about baseball that has absolutely nothing to do with baseball. What the movie really is about is the ego and "genius" of Billy Beane, the man who claims to have changed baseball. The movie is a good drama, with lots of brilliant performances by top notch actors like Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman. However, just like the Social Network these performances lift an otherwise lifeless story with not much happening.