Moneyball

Bennett Miller has gone from documentary film maker to making feature films which are based on true life stories. First came Capote in 2005; now he is working on Foxcatcher with Steve Carrell to be released next year and in-between he was signed on to direct the non-baseball baseball movie, Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, after Steven Soderburgh dropped out and a tortuously long development history.  The back room drama takes place in board locker rooms. Games are listened to on the radio, or echo through the corridors. By making the sport relatively incidental, it at least removes that dramatic paralysis which grips fictionalised sport and makes Pele's overhead kick in Escape to Victory a multi-angled snore boat. What in real life would be a surprising, heart-stopping moment of spontaneous brilliance becomes false and ill conceived in drama. Moneyball could just as easily be about tiddlywinks. What is important here is the bromance between Jonah Hill's nerdy Peter Brandt and Brad Pitt's aging wonder-boy Billy Beane. There are some lingering looks, an insatiable urge to be together and the occasional delicate music cue which suggest that these opposites are kind of attracting. Billy Beane (and hat's off to Mr. Pitt for escaping the gravitational pull of the heavy dumbness of that name) would undoubtedly have bullied Peter at high school and no doubt someone like Beane did, but here the other side of childhood and yet somehow still in the midst of it, there is a mutually advantageous coming together. When we move away from this relationship and back to things like Beane's relationship to his daughter (apparently untroubled--he buys her a guitar and she sings him a nice song) or the travails of the team (a familiar they do badly, they do awful, they do well, they do really well, they don't quite go all the way), a spark goes out. The victory of the film is not going to be a trophy, but rather the realisation that Billy just can't live without Pete.