Baseball’s best book yields terrible movie

Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball, ranks among the best sports book of all time. After the success of The Blindside, this superior Lewis book seemed prime for a film as fantastic as the Sandra Bullock driven movie. Unfortunately, the film adaptation is the worst baseball movie since Major League and The Sandlot spawned sequels.

Moneyball first told the story of the Oakland A’s competing with an inferior budget at the early part of the decade in 2003. Years later, the Michael Lewis masterpiece fell into Bennett Miller’s hands. Screenplay superstars, Steven Zaillian, and Aaron Sorkin, butchered the baseball elements of the film to focus on the character elements. This would have been fine had they actually written in any personalities for the characters.

Like the 2011 Oakland A’s, Miller struggled to recapture the magic of the 2002 team, misdirecting Moneyball into a snooze fest. The film featured more shots of Brad Pitt thinking to himself than actual baseball.

The casting of Pitt as A’s General manager Billy Beane seemed superb. However, if the character does nothing but sit there and silently reflect , than the best actors like Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman lose their advantage over the actors like Keanu Reeves and Jean Claude Van Damme.

The excitement that Lewis infused into a story about revolutionizing baseball strategy takes a backseat to a half-hearted attempt to spotlight Beane’s personal relationships. His bond with his daughter seemed like an artificial addition to the film. While this should make the character more human, he still lacks the personality that enlivened the book version of Beane.

To his credit when Pitt speaks, the character’s charisma comes through. However too many scenes feature him silent or engaging in a conversation that does not affect the plot of the film.

This especially rings true in the chat between Beane and his assistant GM, Peter Brand, about cutting players. The drama, in three later scenes that demonstrate this act, fails miserably. Only one of the players seems to care, and the other two are so nonchalant that the scenes become meaningless additions to the film.

Jonah Hill’s portrayal of Peter Brand makes Paul DePodesta, the real life character, glad he refused the rights to use his name in the movie. The character has no personality, no passion, and no inflection on any word he says.

Like the book, the film flashes back to Beane’s scouting and struggles in the Big Leagues. However, Miller and company once again dropped the ball. These reflections are disjointed and unorganized. They fail to illustrate Beane’s inability to separate emotion from the game.

They show that his time in the big leagues let down everyone including himself. However, in a statistics based movie, filled with titles on the screen, a showing of Beane’s career stats would have helped audiences better understand his hatred for conventional scouting.

A movie based on a book about baseball should have filmed more than just one baseball game. This game, the finale of the streak segment, stands out as the best part of the movie. The sequence is well filmed and captures the emotion of this pivotal game for the Oakland A’s.

Unfortunately, the movie jumps immediately from this streak into the ending of the season. They show just one out of the A’s final game, a decision that once again shows a flaw in either writing or directing.

After this final game, the movie continues to drag on with more Beane self reflection and his forced relationship with Jonah Hill’s character. I have never seen two actors with less chemistry than Pitt and Hill together.

Another horrible flaw that usually helps other baseball movies succeed are the players in the film. They, like the rest of the characters, never showcase any personality or charisma. In fact, they might as well have been posters on the dugout wall.

The characters in the film never have any growth. The movie included an awkward conversation between Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) and David Justice (Stephen Bishop).

Justice attempts to comfort Hatteberg on his fielding concerns, but never reassures him. This scene would have worked in the film had they later shown Justice offering better advice to other players, or had they shown the real life fielding improvement of Hatteberg at first base.

Like every other relationship in this film, this connection never developed. The interaction between Beane and his ex-wife (Robin Wright-Penn) also never goes anywhere, or has any impact on the story being told. It is a forced awkward scene that should decorate the cutting room floor.

Great baseball films showcase players with charisma. The Sandlot, Major League, Little Big League, and the host of other great offerings in the genre, be they kids movies or biographies, have players with personalities. They also have more than one baseball sequence.

Fans of the sport of baseball, and the Michael Lewis masterpiece, should avoid this film at all costs. It is not a baseball movie. It is Brad Pitt thinking time. Terrible directing, screenwriting and mediocre acting efforts earn Moneyball a D- for ruining a great book that should have been a great movie.