Moneyball
"How can you not be romantic about baseball?"
Such a great story, and even nearly 15 years later, this movie remains relevant in today's baseball landscape, maybe even more so. The issue of payroll in baseball is worse now than it was then, with the rich teams getting richer and the poor teams only getting poorer (or being cheap and not spending money on their players, which is an entirely separate issue altogether). When you've got teams like the Dodgers and Yankees shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to free agents while smaller market teams, like Oakland, are left with the crumbs and morsels, it makes for a non-competitive environment.
Now, I'm not sure how accurate the movie's portrayal of Billy Beane is as a general manager or even a father, but I just love Billy's character. He's confident, zealous, and willing to commit to Peter Brand’s statistics-oriented mindset when it comes to analyzing and evaluating players. He has such a strong conviction about it, too, as if he knows it will work out if they just trust the process. Sure, he may be a bit hard on the nose at times, refusing to listen to the A's owner, butting heads with the manager, and being scrutinized by his brain trust of scouts, but as he says, "adapt or die." No one understood this more than Billy Beane. He knew they weren't the Yankees. He also knew that the Oakland A's had the smallest payroll in baseball. Not only is he confident, but he is also resilient and persistent, shaking off the criticism he was met with at the beginning of the season when the A’s weren’t doing well. He keeps pressing on, even if it means he could lose his job. Brad Pitt captured Beane's entire persona to a tee.
Beane loves Oakland so much that he turns down a contract with the Boston Red Sox just so he could continue managing the A's. Now that's devotion. Speaking of devotion, his relationship with his daughter is one of the highlights of the movie for me. While it doesn't get much screen time, it shows the softer side of Billy and his willingness to care, even if the managerial moves over his ball club might say otherwise. It's a nice contrast, and I think the movie does a good job balancing the subplot and the main plot.
And can we talk about Jonah Hill? He is brilliant in this movie. Sure, his role may not have been the most difficult to play, but it marked a turning point in his acting career where we got to see him play a more serious role, markedly different from the typical roles he had been long cast for. It's wonderful that he finally broke free from the fat, dorky character he had been typecast for so long, and seeing him in a different light is a breath of fresh air as it is for me as I'm sure it was for him.
I love this film just as much as Billy Beane loves his A's. They should honestly classify this film as a romance because "it's hard not to be romantic about baseball."