Moneyball dramatizes the first serious attempt to effect a paradigm shift in the way baseball is managed. The basics of the game itself remain the same, but a cash-strapped Oakland team needs to compete with teams that have more money.
Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, Oakland’s general manager, who decides that a statistics geek, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), may have the key to his team’s success. Beane and Brand meet with resistance from the seasoned pros, who are reluctant to try a method that’s never been tried and with which they are completely unfamiliar. Both Pitt and Hill are nominated for Oscars for their performances; while I think Pitt had a better performance in The Tree of Life, Hill definitely deserves the recognition.
This isn’t a baseball movie in the way that Bull Durham was a baseball movie; it’s more about the management than the players. You see more of the business of baseball—the deals, the trades, the negotiations—and somewhat less of the actual games. You see how the strategy for the game starts well before the season does. You see how conflict behind the scenes affects results during the game. And you get the story of a man trying something new in a game of tradition.
Moneyball is nominated for Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor (Pitt), Best Supporting Actor (Hill), Film Editing, Sound Mixing, and Adapted Screenplay.
Watch the trailer here.
Read about some of the liberties the film took with historical accuracy here.
This review, by LR Simon, is part of our series on the 84th Academy Awards.
No comments:
Post a Comment