Moneyball

Baseball is called America’s pastime because we love to imagine it the same we always have. But who still “root roots for the home team” and actually likes Cracker Jack?

“Moneyball” is a clever baseball movie that makes you think differently about the game and the film genre it belongs to. It’s a witty, cynical take on a rousing, inspirational sport, and it’s massively entertaining.

Here is a film that ignores the personality and skill of baseball players, that says the classic ways of finding a winning baseball team is wrong, and stars an anti-hero who’s been kicked down to the point that he doesn’t even see the point of the game anymore. Yet every sports fan is still rapt with attention.

“Moneyball’s anti-hero is Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager for the poor and pathetic Oakland A’s. Through some stroke of luck, he took his team to the 2001 playoffs but was eliminated. Now that his star players have all been bought away by the Yankees and Red Sox, his team has been erased from the history books.

Beane knows the feeling all too well, having a poor outing as a player himself after scouts assured him he would be a superstar. They saw his good form and handsome face and convinced him to leave behind a full ride scholarship to Stanford. Now the same scouts are using the same techniques to rebuild his baseball team, and he knows they’re asking the wrong questions.

Beane’s cynical, systematic approach to selecting a winning team comes from the advice of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale graduate in economics who doesn’t understand the fundamentals of the game all the scouts and managers do, but knows that to win, your team needs runs, needs to get on base, and you need players with good averages who can do that. Nothing else matters, and why didn’t anyone realize how obvious this was before?

The screenplay by Steve Zaillian (“Gangs of New York,” “Schindler’s List”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) wonderfully captures that negative attitude toward the game without antagonizing any of the people who participate in it.

They show us that although Beane and Brand are merely looking at statistics, the scouts find personality as though browsing features in a catalogue. What does matter is that all parties turn the game into a business, where the players are commodities and the smaller companies don’t stand a chance of competing with the big boys.

And leave it to the screenplay to make running a multi-million dollar corporation more fun than a baseball game. While each game is depicted to us by director Bennet Miller as a cold, computerized affair in which only the outcome matters, the most enjoyable moments see Beane wheeling and dealing with players’ lives as he trades to other GMs.

“Moneyball” has such an exciting script, but not because of any athletic heroics. Beane carries each conversation with wit and intelligent jabs that are hilarious in a entitled, condescending way. It’s a movie with a lot of laughs, but no real punch lines. The entire screenplay is geared to this game of one-ups-manship.

And Pitt is perfect in the role. Audiences will be more familiar with this Pitt character type than the one he plays in “The Tree of Life,” but what may be surprising to others is to see him in the defeated, less confident position. Pitt never plays the underdog, yet the drive and sharp edge he shows on screen should be an indicator to how strong his performance is.

Jonah Hill is likewise a good casting choice. He’s quirky and nebbish but never goes for laughs. Even Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who Miller directed to an Oscar win in “Capote,” is playing far off type as the team’s rugged manager.

Even down to the casting, nothing about this baseball movie would seem to fit the smart, crowd-pleasing affair that is. “Moneyball” asks the right questions about sports and gives the right answers to sit back and enjoy the show.

4 stars