Two of my favorite things converge in the release of the movie “Moneyball” in September, and I’m more than a little fascinated by what seems from a distance to be a vanity production of an admittedly interesting topic. Baseball movies have – to understate it a bit – a checkered history that dates back now to nearly 100 years. I’m not sure there are even a dozen so-called baseball movies that I would go out of my way to see, but the flip side is that some of those that do succeed are among some of the most revered films of the postwar generations.
But “Moneyball” figures to test the genre as it has never been tested before. Michael Lewis’ book of the same name was a huge success and helped propel many of the tenets of “Moneyball” – re-evaluating statistics, use of Sabermetrics, reliance on vastly different metrics in determining player value – into the modern baseball lexicon. Most notably, it anointed protagonist Billy Beane, then and current general manager of the Oakland Athletics – as a boy genius because of the on-field success of his ball clubs in small-market Oakland. It’s merely the harshest or ironies that the release of the film comes at a time when the Athletics have suffered mightily for several seasons, a development that doesn’t necessarily mean that the premise of the books and/or movie was flawed, but more likely that the advantages that Beane so effectively utilized 10 years ago have evaporated a bit as other teams have come on board with the Moneyball program to varying degrees.
Still, what intrigues me the most is the cinematic angle in all of this. How in the hell could they have managed to engineer truly dramatic elements into a story that seemingly values the arcane statistics of modern baseball over the ubiquitous car chase, sexual encounters or digitally-enhanced mayhem that are the hallmarks of 21st-century movie making? To say nothing of gunfire. Where are we going to get some gunfire for this movie?
Wrasslin’ with the script was apparently daunting enough that no less of a legendary director than Steven Soderbergh was yanked from the metaphorical mound in favor of a fresh arm, so to speak. When you find yourself pulling Academy Award-winning talent from the film’s brain trust, you know you’ve got yourself a tiger by the tail.
The book is now nearly 10 years old, and I read it shortly after it was published, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to make this into a feature film for widespread theatrical release. It’s probably not fair to lump everything onto Brad Pitt, and I don’t think he’ll be drawn and quartered if the film struggles at the box office, but he sure will turn heads if it somehow turns into a hit of almost any dimension. Trust me, it would be a far bigger accomplishment than what Beane pulled off at the helm of the Oakland franchise in orchestrating the inspiration for the book and film.
I should make it clear that I truly admire Pitt for undertaking something like this, and it causes me to wonder if he’s actually something of a baseball fan in his spare time. With the modern reliance on computer-generated explosions and mid-air catapulting Ninjas in freeze-frame 15 feet off the ground, looking at the book “Moneyball” and deciding there’s a feature film in there was a stirring moment of either bona fide genius or run-of-the-mill insanity. I’m rooting mightily for the former, but concerned that the film night not even make it here to the wilds of Central Wisconsin.
One of the other epic vanity productions of the last few years, the film “Fair Game” about the largely overlooked treason committed by the Bush Administration in revealing Valerie Plame’s role as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, only made it to Central Wisconsin several months after its initial release. As stories go, it had infinitely more compelling tales to tell and a handy set of cinematic villains, but it still struck me as ultimately a vanity production, perhaps because the true parameters of what actually took place in the White House were pretty effectively buried by those with the most to lose.
Another time I will write about my conviction that sacrificing the toothless Scooter Libby was a wretched bit of sleight of hand undertaken by a White House that had actually committed nothing short of treason in outing a CIA agent – and risking the lives of other agents in the process – for nothing more than crass political retribution. The fact that they got away with it doesn’t diminish the significance of what they did.
And as spectacular as Naomi Watts was in the lead role, it may have been one of the few times in the history of cinema when the actual person being portrayed was better looking than the actor selected for the role. In the case of “Moneyball,” I doubt if you could say that about Brad Pitt and Billy Beane, though this is not an area where I consider myself much of an expert.
- T.S. O’Connell
