watch Moneyball

Summary and watch Moneyball

The story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.

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Review and watch Moneyball

Watch Moneyball. Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is Oakland A’s general manager, a Major League Baseball team that simply can’t compete financially with the major teams in the sport.  The New York Yankees, who beat the A’s in the 2001 playoffs, spent north of $120 million in payroll that year in contrast to the A’s somewhere in the neighborhood of $32 million. With the Yankees seemingly unlimited resources comes with top talent, and after being beaten again, Beane feels like he’s got nothing left to give to the game.  He simply doesn’t have the checkbook to try to outbid anyone for the up-and-coming talent everyone else wants.  He’s on the verge of giving up when he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a low-level employee of the Cleveland Indians who has a big idea, a new way of approaching the hiring in baseball, a method that he believes will level the playing field and revolutionize the game.

The suspense of the film, then, is not whether the A’s will win one big game, but whether or not this system that Brand endorses has any merit at all.  Beane bets big on him, and in doing so, he manages to alienate players, fans, commentators, and even his own team’s coach, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman).  But he believes that there has to be some way to make things fair, and he decides to throw caution to the wind.  In doing so, he and Brand find themselves in uncharted waters, completely ignoring conventional wisdom. Moneyball shines in the way it illustrates that victory doesn’t have to be absolute.  If you can show that there are alternative ways of doing things, then you don’t have to be the absolute winner.  Simply expanding the way people think can be the victory.  watch Moneyball

Billiy Beane’s team in “Moneyball” would obviously love to go to the World Series and sweep it all, but the triumph here is simply in shifting the momentum, in proving that this radical idea has some merit and might be worth something.  It is worth it to do what is more difficult sometimes because you make it easier for the next person, and the person after that.  Someone has to go first.  Someone has to take a chance.watch Moneyball

Brad Pitt manages to give a largely internal performance that still communicates volumes.  So much of the movie is about what’s going on behind his eyes, and Pitt has gotten very good at expressing himself through body language, through a simple look.  I would point out that one of his favorite actor’s tricks to keep energy up in a scene is to eat, and in this film, it seems like Billy Beane is eating in almost every single sequence, whether it’s mixed nuts, french fries, or popcorn.  It makes me laugh because I can see Pitt thinking about how to incorporate these mannerisms, how to add color to a particular moment.  He’s great, though, and his scenes with his ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn), her new husband (Spike Jonze) and with his daughter (Kerris Dorsey) are human and warm and vulnerable.

The only other person who gets that close to Billy is Brand, and Jonah Hill may have just changed the course of the rest of his career with the work he does here.  He is frequently funny in the film, but it never feels like he’s reaching for the joke.  This is honest, well-observed work, and he has to play a smart guy who is put to the test, a theoretician given a chance to see his theory in practice.  Their chemistry drives much of the movie, and there’s a certain delight in the way Beane plays off of Brand that is infectious.watch Moneyball

I have no idea how closely this hews to reality, but ultimately, what I took away from this wasn’t a particular feeling this way or that about Beane or the A’s or even baseball.  I just walked away invigorated by the idea that it pays to gamble sometimes, and that just because something is done a certain way, there’s no reason to think it can’t be done better.  This is a film about faith and risk and the enormous rewards of both, and it is somehow far more commercial and inviting than I would have imagined possible.  It’s a major accomplishment. watch new movies