Don’t care about organised sports? Know nothing about baseball? This movie is for you.
First, let’s take a moment to appreciate some of the wonderful work by director of photography Wally Pfister:
Director Bennett Miller has pulled off a deceptively understated magic trick: the technical details may be obscure, but the tension is palpable. I especially enjoyed Jonah Hill here, whose performance, like the film, works because of its under-explanation of the complexities of both the world of pro baseball and the economic concepts his and Brad Pitt‘s characters introduce to this world.
Apparently Steven Soderbergh was originally slated to direct this, and you can totally see him doing it – although he was fired because his vision would have taken it another way: he’s said in interviews that he would have had more documentary-style interviews with the real-life baseball team’s board of experts (who are the guys in the boardroom scenes here) who were so affronted by this new method being thrown in their faces.
Although quite a different film, this joins 1992’s A Few Good Men (both were penned by Aaron Sorkin) in my Movies About Talking list, a category of Hollywood movies that have no sex or violence, which rely totally on dialogue and performance, and are set in a world in which I have little-to-no interest, and yet are riveting from beginning to end.
Further Viewing
The book’s author and the film’s two screenwriters discuss how a story about numbers became a book about trying to change minds, and how an “uncinematic” story was adapted into a script about second chances (via Special Features Archive):
Ben from Canada hits on so many of the things I enjoy about Moneyball (plus he’s a great video editor):
And in Things Coming Full Circle, SNY Mets TV director John DeMarsico brings the movies to baseball: