For most movies about sports, the basic plot deals with an underdog who after a series of setbacks comes back to, if not win the big game or match, but at least will win the respect of the fans.
As for writer Aaron Sorkin, it seems his writing tends to deal with fast-talking, clever repartee that emphasizes the characters believe what they are doing is massively important, because they're so darn smart, and everything they do is of an earth-shattering significance. This tendency is why I haven't seen Sorkin's new HBO drama The Newsroom, since it would seem obnoxious there and the ads annoyed, but I didn't mind it too much in The Social Network because, since it was essentially about Facebook, I can write off the paradigm-shift talk Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake as the usual sort of self-importance some young people possess for no reason, while an over 40 anchorman should, ideally, know better. Maybe I would dig The West Wing since the American President actually does make earth-shattering decisions.
What made 2011's Moneyball so fascinating is that, despite being a sports-based movie, and having Sorkin as a co-writer on the screenplay, neither of the above stereotypes really fit.
To be sure, this is an underdog's story, but the underdog in this case deals with the business side of baseball. There is also a big game where the underdog players triumph. And there is a bit of clever repartee, but coming from the mouth of Brad Pitt and former-Superbad-kid-turned-Academy-Award-Nominee Jonah Hill is quieter, more earnest without being righteous or with the characters too concerned with their own cleverness.
But the thing that actually impressed me with this movie is that, even with the Sorkin pedigree, it is very concerned with, and does a good job dealing with, silences. The above-mentioned big game has patches of no sound which really drives home the tension.
Pitt plays Billy Beane, a one-time player turned general manager for the Oakland A's. After a heartbreaking lose in the playoffs, he sees his two star players poached by bigger market teams and has to rebuild. While visiting Cleveland, he spies Hill and sees Hill seems to have some real influence in the office. Hill, as Yale-educated economist Peter Brand, has a theory on how to best put together a team, using only stats, not star potential or how handsome the player might look on a box of Wheaties. As a result, Beane hires Brand as his new number 2, returns to Oakland, and in defiance of all his scouts, picks up a team of has-beens, nobodies, and never-weres, players who have troubled history, odd playing behavior, or even seemingly career-ending injuries Manager Art Howe (a head-shaved Phillip Seymour Hoffman) initially refuses to play the players Beane and Brand bring in (trying saying that five times fast) until Beane figures the way to force Howe's hand by trading away players Howe refuses to bench.
Surprisingly, Beane and Brand are proven correct. Or perhaps not so surprising, as the movie is based on a true story, and it seems doubtful a movie, or the book it was based on, would be made had the plan been an abysmal failure.
In fact, Beane's program was too successful. After a few years, he gave his secret to author Michael Lewis, who wrote the book this movie was based on, and now many teams with more money than Oakland could ever hope for are winning with Beane's formula, putting the real Beane back where he started. This is a movie, though, about the business of sports, and how a man comes to see numbers as a key to success, and then even comes out of his shell to actually interact with players (Beane makes it a point to never even be in the ballpark during a game due to his own superstitions and won't talk to players he's traded at the start of the movie). Beane both denies and affirms the romanticism of the game, and that makes for an interesting take on the traditional sports film.
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