Welcome back to our ongoing, structurally unsound and largely uncalled-for series in which we re-watch the complete works of Aaron Sorkin in timeline order. You can find earlier entries here. Technically Moneyball isn’t entirely an Aaron Sorkin script, at least not from scratch; he was brought in to rewrite the previous script (by Steve Zaillian) after director Steven Soderberg left the project. However, it appears in his IMDb listing and it is available on UK streaming platforms, so it appears in our Aaron Sorkin watchalong. Thems are the rules.
Also worth noting, if you’re a fan of elegant and intelligent non-fiction: the film is a narrative adaptation of a book of the same title, which turned the author Michael Lewis into a publishing supernova.
Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is the hard-luck manager of the failing baseball team The Oakland Athletics. Then he stumbles across Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and discovers the concept of ‘sabermetrics’. Heart, vibes and mystique are out; marginal gains identified by hard data are in. This approach puts him in conflict with the team manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) but eventually it pays off, giving the Oakland As a record-winning streak of 20 games.
Coming onto Moneyball (2011), Aaron Sorkin was presented with a problem similar to the one Jane Austen gave herself in Persuasion: how can you, as a master of dialogue, write a character who refuses to talk?
Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane is a laconic man. Wounded and embattled, his response is to shut himself away, allowing no ingress to anyone else. ‘It’s a problem you think we need to explain ourselves,’ he says to his data nerd Peter Brand. ‘Don’t. To anyone.’ He insists on not talking to his players and starts all business meetings with the same bland reassurances. He tells no one anything. All of his advice to Brand is about shutting up and letting other people do the talking. ‘Once you get the answer you want, hang up.’
The film’s visual language picks up on this reticence and emphasises Beane’s solitude. Bennet Miller’s direction is full of empty rooms and empty frames: Brad Pitt alone in a deserted stadium, Brad Pitt driving alone at night through the deserted Californian hinterlands. It even shuts out baseball itself; Beane never watches the games, believing he will jinx them if he’s there, and the film shows us only a very little more. The space that would otherwise be occupied by actors pretending to play a game of professional baseball is instead a pixelated montage of grainy TV footage, accompanied by an abstract soundscape of commentary, punditry and call-in shows.
This reserve goes right to the heart of the film’s storytelling, its very structure. I am English and, as a result of my experiences at school, pathologically uninterested in sport. I care even less than I know about baseball. And yet Moneyball is one of my comfort movies, because the film isn’t really about baseball; at least, it’s not about how to win a baseball game. Similarly, the plot premise revolves around the crunching of statistics; this wouldn’t make a very interesting film, so Sorkin totally ignores it. We never have the ‘sabermetrics’ explained to us; we never have the strategy, tournament structure or anything about baseball explained to us. We are shown emotional truths, not obfuscatory facts.
There’s a great example of this in the crucial scene in which Beane first introduces his new method to his team of very traditional talent scouts. The scouts all use comprehensible language, speaking in holistic rather than specific terms: ‘he has a good body for baseball’. But Beane doesn’t care about any of that. All he cares about is whether the player ‘gets on base’. This is repeated over and over again. I have no idea what ‘getting on base’ is, or why it should be important, or why you might not usually worry about it, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I understand the underlying dynamic: the battle between art and data, between tradition and innovation.
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For a film about innovation, though, Moneyball is remarkably traditional. It follows a strict Hollywood three-act structure; the third act even begins with a training montage in which Beane finally loosens up and talks to his players. It is certainly not averse to a big clunking metaphor, either. As Peter Brand arrives at the club he walks past big posters of now-poached star players being taken down. The old world is falling as the new one shuffles in.
The film knows that it is following some well-established pathways and even plays it for laughs. Shots of scrolling spreadsheets are scored by the sort of triumphal music that might usually soundtrack a winning game, only to deflate into the banal office realities of sitting and staring at a screen. It has to do all this tradition, though, because it's dealing with some very weird, nerdy material. Just as ‘Jabberwocky’ makes complete sense even though half of the words are made up, the predictable format helps us understand why these strange details are important by slotting them into a familiar narrative shape.
That shape is what gets called ‘competence porn’, the satisfying vision of able people doing clever things competently. This is why this movie is one of my comfort watches. It tells a story of success that comes not through outrageous talent or fate or being The Chosen One, but through intelligence and a lot of hard work. It’s nice to have a dream.
But then, in many respects, the film, as a creative product is something of a piece of ‘competence porn’ itself.
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