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Perhaps the best movie of Brad Pitt's career

I never looked at Brad Pitt as being an actor. For a long time even in a movie such as  Seven where Morgan Freeman basically ate him alive, I always considered him the other Robert Redford; tall, attractive, but rather bland in the personality department. Call me dull, but I don’t consider Fight Club to be his most solid attempt at acting (his character was a pure brute, what acting does it take to do that?).

Moneyball, despite it’s rather video game sounding title, is the best movie of Brad Pitt’s career and the best performance Brad Pitt has ever given.

The movie is based on Michael Lewis’s book which covered how Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane (along with statistican Paul DePodesta) used math to find the most suitable players for it’s team back in the early 2000′s. The mathmatics formula for success often clashed with the Hollywood approach to finding baseball players for a team, but it meant that fewer dollars had to be spent. Let’s face it: The Oakland A’s have Jay-Z money, while The New York Yankees have James Cameron money. 

Brad Pitt as Bill Beane

This could have easily been a long movie that could have been an episode of CBS’ Numbers, but writers Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin understood that the audience perhaps wouldn’t fully understand or want too much time devoted to the scientific aspects of what Beane and DePodesta were doing. Baseball invovles emotional commitment, not simply moving chess pieces around. I believe that’s why it was so easy for Brad Pitt to find the turmoil within the Billy Beane character.

Jonah Hill as Peter Brand (aka Paul DePodesta)

Escaping the shadow of Superbad and perhaps the upcoming bomb of a film known as 21 Jump Street, Jonah Hill plays human calculator with a soul statistican Peter Brand (who is based loosely on the real Paul DePodesta, who worked with Beane in real life). They could have easily stuck in the corner and made him simply a means of discussing the forumla that would change Baseball teams forever, but the script actually takes the character along Billy’s emotional journey. He keeps the film from being a complete angst fest.

Another reason this film works…

Wally Pfister

He’s noted for his work on Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, which I don’t really care for. Here, he dims the lights when necessary to showcase the dark side of human emotions, but he knows how to turn the lights on when things get too bleak. He also takes some incredible wide shots strategically to also present the notion that Baseball is bigger than the people who love it. My personal favorite of them all is when Jonah Hill enters the Oakland A’s stadium for the first time.

All in all this film deserves a ton of Oscar nominations and more respect than it got on it’s initial release.