‘It treats its audience like adults’: why Moneyball is my favorite movie | Money ball

TAs I got older, I wanted to hear people talk. I want movies where famous people interact in familiar human ways. No one should die; nothing big should be at stake. I just want people to treat me like an adult. Money ball it treats its audience like adults.

Although it was released in 2011, it is a movie from the 1970s: its theme is synonymous with the entertainment of this decade. In Money ballAmerican society is in the hands of the elite, and the only person who doesn’t believe in the system is trying to change things. Yes, it’s about baseball instead of the CIA, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the same movie. Brad Pitt he was finally seen as an heir Robert Redford.

Moneyball is proof that if you put in good actors and a good script, as long as the director doesn’t go too far, you will have a good thing. It’s subtle: his acting is rare – and smart, because actors who pretend to be acting are a shame. It is verbal: it requires you to listen to what is being said, but it makes it easy to understand. And it is forever rewatchable: best airplane movie, insomnia movie, sick day movie.

Pitt plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, the poorest team in baseball. The film asks (and this would be a great setup for a big Hollywood movie) how can data analysis identify the unrecognized value of baseball players, as a way to combat economic inequality between groups? By the way screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, along with the director Bennett Millerit turned into a human drama.

He was aided by excellent performances from Pitt, putting his usual arrogance to one side – because Beane, if not a loser, is not a winner: a failed player and GM of a struggling team – and from. Jonah Hill. The star of Superbad plays a team called Peter Brand, mainly from Beane’s former assistant Paul DePodesta, and it is his job to give Pitt both the cartoon and the scientific explanation: think of him as Margot Robbie in a bathroom in a bathroom. The Big Short. He does so without his usual madness: a child thrown in at the deep end, realizing the position he now has.

We need someone to explain the science because it is Michael Lewis changeand one of the great things about Lewis’s writing is that he skims over complex issues in a way that makes sense, even if nothing sticks for more than 30 seconds. If you don’t do science, you’re done. The Blind Side: a book about how the change in football practices encourages the use of a certain physical type of a black boy, which became a wonderful film in which Sandra Bullock took a poor black boy and helped him become a football star.

But if you do a lot of science, you end up with The Big Short. Compulsive as it is – and Pitt apparently loved another swing from Lewis – it’s a little overdue science: it asks us to take as our heroes the people who became unknowingly wealthy because of the economic hardships of ordinary Americans. You may not feel for anyone in The Big Short, but Moneyball has a lot of people. You want Pitt, Hill and their odd team – a classic starting point Chris Pratt like unpopular and vulnerable pitcher Scott Hatteberg – to win. You hear both sides: the old scouts who insist that you can test the player, and Pitt and Hill insist on reality, You hear, especially, from the coach Art Howe – they were played badly Philip Seymour Hoffman – seeing his entire organization taken from him by Pitt.

Moneyball distorts reality but not too badly. Its one flaw is the saccharine and unnecessary plot that exists to show that Beane cares about the daughter of his failed marriage (I don’t know if it’s fun for us, or an insult to him, that Robin Wright grows up for a short time as his ex). But even during family time there are small barbs: Wright’s new husband tries to talk about baseball and Pitt and Wright correct his pronunciation. At first, it’s like a bond they have that they can’t share; Think about it a little longer and you realize that Wright knows this because he heard nothing but baseball in his marriage, not because he’s a fan.

And above all, there is no happy ending. The A’s never win the World Series. Beane was offered the biggest job in baseball and turned it down, which for fans was the most difficult moment in the entire Moneyball saga. Was he loyal to the A’s? Or is he too afraid to leave his little kingdom behind? At least this movie leaves us wondering.