Sorkin Steps Up to the Plate

"Moneyball"

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin struck Oscar gold last year with his script for The Social Network.  The fact that his dialogue driven, 150 page script was turned into a 120 minute feature was pretty impressive.  Sorkin was able to make mainstream audiences understand computer programming and the creation of Facebook.  That's a hard thing to do.  Now to be fair not everything in that film was entirely true and certain details were changed to fit the story because of its cinematic setting.  However it was that script that really propelled that film and made for one remarkable piece of entertainment.  A year has passed and Sorkin has put out another screenplay (co-written with Steve Zaillian) called Moneyball.  This time he takes movie going crowds out to the ball game.  

The team we happen to be rooting for is the 2002 Oakland A's.  General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is in a real pickle.  He just lost a trip to the World Series as well as his top three players to other teams.  Why did these guys leave?  Money.  It's all about money.  As the opening titles indicate to us, the New York Yankees have a massive payroll of $114 million vs. Oakland's $40 million.  With the departure of their star players Billy realizes that it is time to rebuild.  How is he going to do it on such on puny budget?  A Yale graduate who majored in economics by the name of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) holds the answers to Billy's predicament.  Peter tells Billy that together they can rebuild a team that consists of players whose current teams have given up on them.  The A's can pick them up cheap and turn them into winners because statistically speaking it is possible to do so.  Billy trusts Peter and the statistical computer program he devised that essentially predicts the team will have a favorable outcome by the end of the season.

Moneyball is a success story about a man who took a real chance in playing against the odds in a professional sport setting not really knowing if it would it payoff.  Pitt does a fine job of communicating the anxiety, frustrations, triumphs, and politics of baseball experienced over the course of one season.  Or rather, Sorkin does.  Those who are not fans of baseball, Sorkin flavors the subject matter into a pill that everyone can digest.  For once this isn't about the players on a team and their rise to glory but instead the man behind the scenes who put it all together.  True followers of the sport will probably have their gripes about how the events of the 2002 A's actually happened but just remember this is a movie, not a documentary.  

Being an avid fan of any professional sport probably would help as you can relate to the agony of watching your favorite team lose and wonder what sort of politics are actually at play.  One example is the scenes between Billy and head coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman.)  There is a clear power struggle between the two characters.  One wants his team to win with the players who are (statistically speaking) capable of winning the game.  The other wants to keep his job or at least have some answers when he's being interviewed by other teams on the decisions he made as a coach.  The higher ups in a professional organization are rarely at fault.  It's the players and coaches who are always to blame, right?  Moneyball does an excellent job of showing us things that occur on a team that we only read about in newspapers.

There are several scenes in this film that involve Billy and the relationship he has with his twelve year old daughter that come off as quite distracting.  It’s these few parts when the story loses focus and we're taken out of the game.  They seem forced and only in there so as to gain our sympathies towards Billy.  Those scenes also build to an ending scene that seems very textbook and Hollywoodized (maybe Zaillian wrote those parts.)  We already have a good idea of what going on in Billy's head.  The flashbacks we see of him when he used to be a player who signed right out of high school for all the wrong reasons gives us a good set up for how his character changes over time.   

Director Bennett Miller received much praise for his direction on Capote.  Finally we get to see his sophomore project.  The result is good but not great.  While his direction and the performances he gets from his actors is superb, it's those few aforementioned moments from the script that hurt the film.  Moneyball still comes highly recommended as one of the best films of the year.  A solid effort all around from the cast and crew makes Moneyball out be another choice piece of entertainment in a subject matter that would otherwise would be for sports junkies.  Miller and Sorkin get the bases loaded, score some runs, but don't quite get the grand slam.  A hit deep into left field is more like it.