Moneyball Film Review

I was very interested to see how the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis would turn out on film. So on opening night for those of us who aren’t in the media and don’t have friends, I went to see it. And…it was good.

For those who don’t know, Moneyball was an interesting book published in 2003 about the Oakland A’s and their General Manager Billy Beane. The book looked at the statistical tools that Beane and his colleagues brought to their selection of players and how those methods helped them compete with teams who had much larger budgets.

The movie, Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller and starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill covers the same topic with Pitt playing the part of Billy Beane. I read the book several years ago and enjoyed it, but didn’t have all of the details fresh in my mind, so I can’t say if the movie is veers far from the material in the book. I do think the movie creates a story out of the underlying premise of the book and the dialogue and character interactions are often funny. You feel for this team and these people as they try to compete. You also get a sense of the demons that have hounded Beane throughout his career in baseball through the flashbacks that intersperse the main story.

I enjoyed the interplay between Pitt and Hill and everyone in the theatre laughed many times at Hill’s straight man responses. This is a fun movie, with tension, humor and some seriousness all wrapped up together. There is no reason that you couldn’t wait to see this on home theatre, but the big screen does make the stadium and game shots more impressive. It’s the story that makes this movie and the interesting characters. Overall, I give Moneyball 4 Mick Happies. Play ball.