MONEYBALL

Directed by: Bennett Miller
Run Time: 133 min
 

I don't understand baseball and how people play it. I have seen it on TV and I think it is boring. However it does not turn me down as I know the fact that this one is about baseball since this one is an Oscar nominated film with Brad Pitt on it. But this one is a tough sell for international audience, unless if it is about football.

Unlike many sports drama that relies heavily on dramatic cliche and last minute scoring (well it does happen here but very subtle) this one relies on meetings, dialogues and phone calls. What makes it interesting is how 'flat' but deep this film is. Flat in a sense that there's nothing much going on that can be called as dramatic, not even a romance just like in Jerry Maguire but 'deep' in a sense that Brad Pitt acted his character, Billy Beane, in a good way we can see his layers as a GM and as a father.

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), former would-be superstar of baseball, he is now the general manager of Oakland Athletic team.  As a GM he faces a huge problem; replacing three of their star players with shoe string budget. Billy then hires Yale-educated economist behind the desk guy, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who 'created' a certain mathematical formula in how to assemble a 'cheap' but skillful team. To take matter simply, what Beane tries to do is to built a team as strong as FC Barcelona with the budget of Aston Villa by exploiting undervalued athletes instead of trying to buy a star one.

Billy believed in this so called new approach and try to implement it, to the disdain of many who thinks that baseball cannot be determined by numbers, especially coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). He put everything at stake, even his job as a GM. Will he pull it? Especially it is him against the world.

It is the mixture of instinct, personal approach and statistic, Beane proved that by swimming against the current, sometimes it is worth the fight. Sometimes.