Releases: 16th February 2012
The Review>> I’ll come clean right from the start – I know less than nothing about baseball. And although that makes some of the background of the film a bit baffling, this isn’t actually a film about baseball.It’s a movie about relationships, about being brave enough to stand up against the crowd, about taking chances and about backing the underdog. Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is driven because he made a choice between going to University (Stanford) and earning big bucks as a baseball player. He chooses the latter but subsequently turns out to be what I believe they might call a ‘choker’. He fails to deliver. That makes him sympathetic to players who haven’t found their own route to success, and at the age of 44 he finds himself as General Manager of San Francisco’s Oakland A’s baseball team.
The team’s lost all its top players to richer teams,, so when nerdy, geeky, never-played-a-game-of-baseball-in-his-life Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) shows him how statistics can reveal a potentially successful team in an otherwise unlikely bunch of players, he decides he has nothing to lose. He starts picking players who aren’t ideal – but who, statistically, deliver what the team needs to win. This sets up some major confrontation with the team’s coach and scouts, who think it’s a gimmick which will ultimately lead to ruin and disaster. The team embarks on the road to the Baseball World Series and gradually starts to prove that Beane and Brand’s unorthodox methods work. There are some fascinating scenes – one of the most breathless is the wheeler-dealing as Beane and Brand attempt to put their ideal team together on the phone, involving fast talking and faster dialling. Other parts of the film are slower, and give us a chance to see the inner tensions that Beane faces as the doubts of others threaten to make him doubt himself.
If you had told me I would sit through 133 minutes of a movie about a sport I knew nothing about, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Brad Pitt’s performance is so real, he doesn’t actually appear to be acting. His fixed smile as he delivers (or receives) bad news, his awkwardness with his daughter’s stepfather, his nervousness that prevents him actually watching any of his team’s games live, his compulsive eating of junk food all hint at so much more going on beneath the surface. This is so much more than just delivering the lines and not falling over the furniture – here Pitt creates a person who feels like he’s real.
Some extra bits to know about the film and to look out for>> Several of the actors playing the ballplayers have baseball experience. Casey Bond spent time in the Giants’ organization, Stephen Bishop played for three years during the ’90s (including one season where he played with David Justice, who he portrays in the film), Royce Clayton played 17 years in MLB and Derrin Ebert played five games for the Braves in 1999.
All but one of the scouts in the movie were played by actual Major League Baseball scouts. Tom Gamboa, who played “Scout Martinez”, is perhaps best known as the Kansas City Royals first base coach who was attacked on the field by two fans during a game against the Chicago White Sox on September 19, 2002. The father and son, highly intoxicated, ran onto the field unprovoked, tackled Gamboa, and threw several punches before being restrained by players and security. As a result of the attack, Gamboa ultimately suffered permanent hearing loss.
Big Screen NZ 