Moneyball

A version of this review appeared in The Age, November 12, 2011.

“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman famously observed in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade.  He was writing about Hollywood – about the fact that studios have no way of telling which movies will hit and which will flop.

But what if a magic formula existed in other areas, in sports for example?  That's the dream which propels Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game – a 2003 bestseller by the financial journalist Michael Lewis, and now the basis for a film by Bennett Miller, who hasn't directed since the highly-praised Capote (2005). Brad Pitt plays the real-life baseball manager Billy Beane, whose cash-strapped team the Oakland Athletics looks like a losing proposition at the start of 2002. To turn things around, Billy puts his faith in an innovative system known as "sabremetrics".

Essentially, this means running statistics through a computer to figure out which players are the best value for money. It's an approach that Billy's wonkish sidekick Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) – an amalgam of Beane's real-life advisors – compares to card-counting at the blackjack table: you may not win every time, but at least you can be sure the odds are on your side.

This is a perplexing movie, on one level following a standard inspirational formula, but transforming its meanings in almost deliberately alienating ways.  Though the newly recruited Athletics players are standard-issue underdogs – Peter poetically describes them as “misfit toys" – the main focus is on Billy and Peter, who represent economic rationalism at its purest. Proudly indifferent to the mystical lore of baseball, they're simply interested in trawling the records for consistent patterns, arriving at what Paul Keating would call a beautiful set of numbers.

In other words, this is a revenge-of-the-technocrats story,  something you don't see very often.  Pitt uses his laid-back grin as a weapon much as he did in Inglourious Basterds (2008), letting his sunny charisma win us over to a character whose most visible emotions are anger and disappointment. As we learn through a series of clunky flashbacks, Billy himself was signed up to the major leagues as a lad by scouts who saw him as a guaranteed future champion; his failure to live up to his promise has left him with a grudge against those who make decisions based on intuition rather than solid facts.

Instead, he relies on the supremely unathletic Peter: a Yale economics graduate and a figure presented with something close to awe, as the Magic Nerd who supplies all the answers. Hill is yet to star in any film that couldn't be described as a “bromance,” and here he serves, almost explicitly, as a substitute spouse for the divorced Billy; their us-against-the-world bond is the closest Moneyball comes to persuasive warmth.

To non-Americans – and especially non-baseball-fans – this material may seem esoteric at best.  But Miller treats it with glib solemnity, dragging the film out far past its natural length; the action on the field is secondary to the talky expository sequences, typically centred on manly power-plays in dimly-lit rooms.

Much of the semi-clever dialogue bears the stamp of Aaron Sorkin, whose Oscar-winning script for last year's The Social Network could be understood as a fable about the perils of reducing complex phenomena to easily-manipulated data. Here, too, there's room for a certain amount of ambiguity: sabremetrics seems to depend on the assumption that a team is merely the sum of its individual members, a view of sport (and life) that's hard to accept without qualms.

It's tempting to speculate that if Peter hadn't gone into baseball, he might have made a short-lived fortune on Wall Street trading sub-prime mortgages. But on the whole, Moneyball suggests that the experts have it sorted – and that a certain amount of calculated risk can pay off. Whatever the public make of this message, it will probably help studio heads to sleep at night.