Baseball team Oakland Athletics loses another game. Their sports manager Billy Beane is disappointed. His budget is limited, so he is not able to buy the best—and most expensive—professional baseball players. At Cleveland Indians, he meets and teams up with assistant Peter Brand, who uses a new kind of application method, sabermetrics, to evaluate each player, calculating that many “cheaper” players have actually hiden potential. Billy and Brad go on to assemble a new team with little money. At first, the new team loses a game, but after exchanging further players, they are able to get a team that gets 19 consecutive wins. Oakland loses in the final game, but the owner of Boston Red Sox offers Billy a big sum for becoming their general manager because he achieved as many victories as the Yankees, but with a five times less cost.
“Moneyball” is a surprisingly effective depiction of sports management, probably because the sports were reduced to a minimum, and 90% of its appeal lies in the excellent, fascinating character of Billy Bean, played brilliantly by Brad Pitt: he was rightfully picked as the protagonist since he is always in center stage wherever he goes, due to his snappy attitude and witty remarks—he simply has a personality. The screenplay by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin has strong, outstanding dialogues, as if the two writers were competing in who will write a better quote. In one example, managers are discussing their baseball team during a meeting, commenting about a certain player (“He has an ugly girlfriend. Ugly girlfriend means no confidence”), until Billy interupts them to cut to the chase (“And now we’ve been gutted. We’re like organ donors for the rich. Boston’s taken our kidneys, Yankees our heart. And you guys just sit around talking the same old good body nonsense like we’re selling jeans!”). In another moment, Billy admits: “I hate losing more than I wanna win!” After his team loses a game, he enters their locking room, just stands there and says: “You think losing is fun?!” While the movie will intrigue more of those viewers interested in baseball and less those who are bored by the sport—which pretty much covers a lot of the world outside of America where baseball isn't that appealing—it has more than enough clever building blocks to impress, while the director Bennett Miller uses the story to even tackle more universal themes, including the nature of competition and the fear of losing your job in capitalism, as well as attempts by the small to try to break the monopoly of the big establishment. Indeed, a small home run for all involved.
Grade:+++
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