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| Brad Pitt doing his best Robert Redford impersonation. |
Unlike fellow Best Picture Nominee The Descendants, which was also adapted from a book, I wish I had read Michael Lewis's 2003 account of Oakland A's GM Billy Beane rather than watch director Bennett Miller and Brad Pitt's film version.
There are a couple of reasons why I feel this way. The first is that I'm quite sure I would have learned a great deal more about Beane's revolutionary strategy for building a competitive small market team in Major League Baseball by immersing myself in the specific principles and theories of "Sabermetrics", the term coined by one of the pioneers of the strategy, Bill James. The second is that having viewed the film, I feel that the book's subject matter does not lend itself well to the dramatic conventions of film.
The film version does an admirable job of simplifying a concept based on the complex analysis of player statistics, but it seemed to really struggle in dramatizing a concept primarily concerned with number crunching. On top of that, Beane's Oakland A's teams, while experiencing a certain degree of success, did not even advance that far in the playoffs, let alone make The World Series. Perhaps that's not the point, but Moneyball doesn't let minor quibbles such as these interfere with its headlong charge at baiting Oscar voters.
Brad Pitt plays Beane in the film, and while his performance is certainly energetic and at times compelling, I just don't think the role merits a Best Actor nomination. Same goes for Jonah Hill's performance as Paul Brand, Pitt's stat geek assistant, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. This is a film about two men who take a highly unorthodox approach to building a winning baseball team. They face long odds and much skepticism from their peers, but their story falls short of any type of true emotional transcendence.
Moneyball is a film for baseball fans, and particularly students of the game. As for the rest of us, how about The Descendants?
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