As crappy as “What’s Your Number?” is there was a movie this weekend that gave me hope that the future of movies is not lost. I saw Moneyball and (even though I’m not a baseball or even a sports fan whatsoever) consider it easily one of the best sports based movies I’ve seen in several years. Really, it’s not truly about sports. I know all sports based movies say that they’re really about the triumph of the human spirit and blah blah blah, but Moneyball truly is about more than baseball. It’s about the business of baseball.
This movie eschews most of the cliches associated for sports movies and goes full bore into the cold, hard reality of the game. You see players get traded (discarded and picked up like disposable player cards), you see the budget negotiations to buy players, you see the very real friction between Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s conventional manager and Brad Pitt’s ingeniously inventive general manager. Not everyone will like this movie (two young, athletic-seeming girls sitting beside me got up and left 40 minutes in, I guess expecting more of the typical sports movie experience) but those seriously craving adult storytelling will love it.
What Works: The realism, the number crunching pragmatic swing of negotiating players has never felt so exciting. The script really hums, and it’s no surprise Aaron Sorkin (of last year’s The Social Network, also about business maneuverings and sharp dialogue) wrote it. Just the overall flavor really comes out in every scene. Virtually every performance works from Hoffman and Pitt to cameos like Arliss Howard as the wise owner of the Boston Red Sox surrounded by fools.
What Doesn’t Work: To say this is the tightest movie ever made wouldn’t be accurate (it’s probably 10 minutes too long) and the ending doesn’t exactly work, but it’s hard to blame the movie for that since it’s based on a true story.
What I Would Have Done Differently: There probably are some things (such as, would I really have casted Jonah Hill in an important supporting role?) but why nitpick when I was having such a good time?
I think the script is really loosely based on the book. I think the actual book focuses more on the actual SABRmetrics, which I am sure was glossed over in the movie for the general audience.