This is a fairly classic movie, but it completely drew me in. It’s the beaten down outsider who throws himself against a huge institution and changes the institution, it’s the triumph of the underdog against the enemy, and it’s the leader with his own insecurities who continues to lead. And it’s baseball. It’s hard to be more American than this, but films like it aren’t always done well.
Moneyball is done well. The main character here, Billy Beane, has a lot of complexity, which is not common in such sports movies. We like as he butts heads with his own institutional scouts and his tradition-oriented manager, but we squirm a little as we see him making hard calls by firing nice people, feeling conflicted about his own failure to pursue an education and succeed as a player, and trying to be a part-time father. There’s a mix in the character of estimable and conflicted that you don’t usually see in mainstream Hollywood, and that makes the center of the film, Billy, more interesting.
Being about baseball, this is a guy’s movie, and the guys pull it off well enough. Brad Pitt plays in his typically limited range here, so he’s a better general manager than ex-husband or part-time dad. His numbers cruncher Peter Brand as Jonah Hill has a similarly limited range, but that works for him, too, in the role of a young geek with authority for the first time. In contrast to those two, Philip Seymour Hoffman owns every scene he’s in. He is the A’s manager, an immersion that Pitt nor Brand is able to pull off. But the acting works here; Moneyball doesn’t necessarily need more from the central roles as written.
I was very engrossed in the film, so engrossed, in fact, that I eventually came to use the highly-manipulative soundtrack to help me reduce my anxiety: minor key vibration means something bad is going to happen, major key tone means something good. When the story suspense got too intense, I focused on the music soundtrack, and the music's helped me reduce my anxiety. Without them, the suspense would have been harder to bear.
This is a notch above average film. I felt I was getting a little look behind what runs MLB as well as some good, capable entertainment.
