Engaging and funny, Moneyball is an excellent and unique movie that offers up a great story with terrific performances.

Based on a book of the same name, Moneyball tells the true story of Oakland Athletics’s General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and his attempt to allow his low budget ball club compete with bigger market teams and try to win the World Series. Toward this end, he discovers a devotee of Bill James’s Sabermetrics, a method of choosing players based on their on statistical factors as opposed to the host of other metrics scouts typically use when filling out a team’s roster. This devotee, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), quits his job with the Cleveland Indians to go to work with Beane, a move that causes an uproar with the scouting staff when Beane starts putting more stock in what Brand has to say than all of their hard collected data and experience. Brand believes that by basing their choices on on base percentage alone, they can put together a championship team on the A’s budget. Beane’s personnel choices lead to further uproar amongst the baseball establishment and it looks like he is screwing everything up until he takes a hardline with the team’s manager (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and players who are trying to undermine him to maintain the status quo.

Moneyball is interesting for a number of reasons. As a baseball fan, it is fun to see into the front office and see how trades are conducted and some of the gamesmanship between owners and GMs. As a fan of hardluck stories, Moneyball is interesting for Beane and the events leading up to his position in the film. He was a sure thing prospect and gave up an ivy league scholarship to play baseball based on his ability to play just about every aspect of the game extremely well but then choked when he got there and he became a scout and eventually a GM. His story, even outside of the events of Moneyball, is interesting and it is refreshing to see a character like this. The movie is also interesting in that it is an uplifting and inspiring story but it does not have the benefit of a tidy Hollywood happy ending because it is based on true events.

The movie also raises a lot of questions about the establishment and about Sabermetrics, or advanced statistics, and the effectiveness of the different approaches. This is a debate that continues to rage as some organizations have taken to the system and others have stuck with the traditional way of running a club. The movie is fairly unflinching in dealing with successes and failures and a full acknowledgement is made of where each method are successful and unsuccessful. It seems like the answer is somewhere in the middle as there are always going to be intangible factors involved in a baseball game from weather to how much rest a player has gotten but from a statistical standpoint it is hard to argue with Sabermetrics.  I don’t really want to get into the debate about the methods as I am just talking about the film here but it makes a compelling argument.

The writing is pretty fantastic which is not surprising when the writing credits include Aaron Sorkin. The dialogue is snappy and a lot funnier than one would imagine. The pacing works pretty well although near the end it starts to feel a little long. Even still, the material is engaing and the characters are compelling . The evolution of Beane as a character is fascinating to watch as he is a person who continues to strive after life has taken him out at the knees. There is a certain tragedy here too as even when he succeeds to whatever degree, it isn’t good enough. This keeps him driven but you also get a sense that he is a bit like Don Quixote fighting windmills.

The performances were very good here and the actors had to do a lot of the film’s heavy lifting as it was less about action filled baseball scenes and more about heated discussions in boardrooms and brooding. Brad Pitt looks pretty haggard here and everything from facial expression, vocal tone and body posture sells the tension and pain he has gone through that informs his hope and drive to achieve. Jonah Hill does well in a role that is outside of his typical type and calls for earnestness which is not something his characters have typically had to any real degree. Philip Seymour Hoffman is like a chameleon here as I barely recognized him as  Art Howe and he is absolutely excellent.

Conclusion [9.5 out of 10]

There is a lot more to say about Moneyball but it is best covered seeing the film. The movie is funny, heartbreaking and dramatic and it works very well. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to like this movie and if you skip it because it is sports related then you are doing yourself a disservice. Moneyball is one of the best movies of the year so far and should not be missed.