Moneyball (2011)

It takes a lot for me to see a movie more than once. Admittedly, I saw Inception six times in the theaters, but that was kind of a special case: it was an interesting story, a visually striking film, and Ellen Page is totally cute. So when I decided to go see Moneyball a second time, I knew it must merit some serious attention.

I went into Moneyball with high expectations the first time, having read and enjoyed the book from which it originates earlier in the year. What intrigued me most about this film as an adaptation is that the book is not, in and of itself, a great story. Pieces of the book rely rather heavily on a solid grounding in baseball statistics, and, while it isn't absolutely necessary to be a stats-savvy baseball junkie such as myself, it certainly doesn't hurt. But the movie dances around many of the scarier metrics (VORP, WAR, OPS+) and instead chooses to focus almost entirely on Brad Pitt's portrayal of Oakland As general manager Billy Beane. However, there were still major challenges to overcome. Unlike high school or college sports, Major League Baseball is big business, and individual players are relatively unimportant. It is difficult to show an inspirational sports moment when central scenes in the movie involve Jonah Hill crunching numbers on his laptop.

I have read that Pitt's insistence on completing this movie is one of the reasons it did eventually wrap; without his determination and stubbornness (and a surprise cameo by Leonardo DiCaprio as an executive producer), Moneyball almost certainly would have never moved beyond the initial drafts. This is not the first time Pitt has forced a project to its finished form - the lengthy title of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was literally written into Pitt's contract for that movie - and I certainly hope it is not the last. Pitt saw a story that needed to be told, and insisted that it was. The question I wondered was, how would director Bennett Miller do it?

Moneyball tackles this problem, ironically enough, by taking itself more seriously as a film than it might have. By that I mean that it never forgets what it is, and never really asks us to, either. Some films - action and sports films, especially, in my opinion - tend to ask us to suspend our disbelief and become hugely emotionally invested in the characters. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate this as much as anyone, and I still shed a tear every single time I watch Invictus or Remember the Titans. But Moneyball takes a different tack. It is replete with intertitles, cutaways to division standings, newspaper clippings, and real game footage from 2002. The sound is manipulated just as patently; lengthy voice-overs move the story forward at key moments. It feels like we are watching a documentary at times, and in a way, we are. What Miller and Pitt (I feel that both deserve credit for this) accomplish by focusing on Beane's story is a blurring of genres, and an introduction of a touching side into what could easily have been an emotionally blank slate.

I felt that this film-school technique worked extremely well, but I must offer a caveat: it will not be for everyone. I say this especially because the second time I saw the film, I sat in front of an elderly couple who were, ahem, confused and put off by this somewhat avant-garde method of storytelling. Their method of decoding the film involved talking it over in that special whisper that one develops at age seventy that is just a smidge, forty decibels or so, louder than is appropriate at the movies. When I am old, I wish to have my own small movie theater. That way, I will never bother anyone when I talk during movies. And popcorn will be cheaper.

Go see this film. I promise you, even if you aren't a baseball fan, you will enjoy Pitt's performance and the way Miller orchestrates what is, all things considered, a very complex tale. I would be surprised if this film isn't in the conversation for Best Picture and Best Actor, along with a handful of technical awards, come February.

And please don't talk during the movie.