Title: Moneyball

Opens: September 23, 2011

After the Enron scandal and surely after the recent debacle that led to Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns’ belly-up act, Accounting became not a subject for geeks but a course leading to a full-scale macho degree. Could the same be said for majors in General Economics? Not in the larger sense but in a situation in which the major league baseball team, the Oakland Athletics, found themselves, Economics turns out to be a solid, manly course of study. In the case of the big-budget but low-key “Moneyball,” directed by Bennett Miller (“Capote”) after Steven Soderbergh was “traded away” from the feature partly because he was creating too much of a documentary look, a pudgy fellow with an Economics major from Yale University ups his career from being an assistant to a manager from another team to sending the Oakland A’s from the cellar to the top of the heap; or as stated by the A’s general manager (not an exact quote) there’s the top tier, there’s a second tier, then there are 50 feet of crap, and under that you will find us.

This is not to say that Economics is a subject that requires big bucks to hire winning players. Just look at the experiences undergone by the A’s at the turn of our century, losing regularly because the backers could not put up enough money to buy the best talent. If the Yankees, for example, could retain top ball players for a stash of millions of dollars each, the A’s had to do with tens of thousands-which, by conventional wisdom means that they will never amount to much. Enter the duo of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), among the most unlikely people ever paired off by the movies. The equivalent in politics would be a bosom-buddy coupling of far-right congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. Beane is a macho guy who eats everything in sight but keeps his weight down, presumably, with chewing tobacco, which he regularly spits into a paper cup. Brand is wholly out of shape though is never seen consuming food. Brand got his Economics degree from Yale while Beane is a high-school graduate who turned down a full football-baseball scholarship at Stanford in order to join the A’s, becoming its general manager when he no longer had the needed youth. (“Some give out at 18, others at 40.”) Beane has charisma that would stop a discussion while Brand, for all his weight, would remain invisible. After Billy hears Peter combining a discussion of statistics and baseball strategy, he questions the man and hires him away to Oakland as his adviser.

More important even than the position of director is that of screenwriter. Co-scripter Aaron Sorkin is well-known by movie buffs everywhere as the scribe for the award-winning “The Social Network.” Sorkin’s skill is making ordinary conversations sound like magical words of wisdom. This is good since while some time is spent on the field watching the players field and bat and while flashbacks take us to part of Billy’s career as a player, the principal feature of “Moneyball” is the conversations away from the diamond. We get more than an inkling about the backlot business of trading players as though they were baseball cards rather than real people, decisions made in minutes and executed by the general manager almost without emotion. One fellow on the team has something wrong with his leg: he is let go without another team to pick him up, while others go, say, from Oakland to Detroit while Oakland gets a player from that city with a few hundred thousand in cash.

In the same way that old-fashioned methods of farming have long been chucked in favor of scientific agriculture, the sport of baseball-if we project from what we see in “Moneyball”-is fast becoming one no longer wholly dependent scouts who watch players cavort about the field in colleges, high schools, whatever, and instead study statistics such as how many times a fellow has gotten on base. (I had always thought that statistics counted heavily throughout: in fact a former colleague of mine took pride in memorizing and quoting such arcane trivia as numbers of RBI’s, base hits, walks, strikeouts, the works from any team.)

Brad Pitt’s performance is inspired as this time he is not a golden boy but rather a vulnerable character who sticks his neck out to go with the statistical approach contrary to the advice of crusty manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the old guys who serve as the team’s board of directors. Several off-the-field scenes find Pitt’s character act like a great dad with his daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey), a girl who plays guitar and sings and shuttles by air between Oakland and her divorced mother’s place (Robin Wright). When Casey worries that her dad will be fired if his team continues its losses, Billy assures her with false confidence that there’s no chance. Yet the kid is sensitive enough to sing what she feels, and what she feels is from Lenka’s “The Show.” “I’m just a little bit caught in the middle/ Life is a maze and love is a riddle/ I don’t know where to go, can’t do it alone/ I’ve tried and I don’t know why.”

I like the metamorphosis undergone by Jonah Hill’s character, Pete,at first mystified and flattered that Billy even talks to him, wearing a tie a inch or two below the neck, then converting to open-collar shirts and dominating the conversation with his hero by pushing him to reveal more than he would like. Director Miller finds more drama in the talk than on the field, opening the film to an audience that knows nothing about baseball and making “Moneyball” the first real major movie of the prestige season. Michael Lewis, whose recent best seller, “The Big Short,” is about the recent scandal indulged in by Wall Street brokerage houses, may have that non-fiction tome picked up by a studio. His “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” can be picked up at Amazon for under ten bucks.

Rated PG-13. 133 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall – B+