|

|
EDITOR'S PICK
Rating: ****1/2
The irony of most team sports is that individual star players become bigger than
both the team and the game. With the current controversy of Sachin Tendulkar and
Ricky Ponting, who refuse to retire despite having neither age nor performance
on their sides, the timing for "MoneyBall" release in India is
perfect.
Yet, to the credit of writer Aaron Sorkin, who previously gave us "The
Social Network", he ensures this is not just a sports film. By making
sports a metaphor for life, it becomes one of the best sports films ever made
and a very worthy contender for multiple Oscars.
After a dismal show by his team, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of
the baseball team Oakland A, tries to find a winning team.
But his budget is too small to take expensive star players. With the help of a
young statistics nerd (Johan Hill), he decides to turn conventional baseball
wisdom upside down to opposition from everyone -- till, in the end, his formula
works and everyone stands up to take notice of this man, who changes the way the
game is played, forever.
Like a promotional line from this film based on a true story, it is indeed
"a movie for anybody who has ever dreamt of taking on the system" and
changing it. Though it is a film about a sport, it has so many layers, multiple
analogies, unsaid things that the film becomes a delicious ride for the
discerning movie viewer.
The stunning screenplay delves into such layers that what is visible is just the
teaser for what really is in it, which a viewer has to decipher. Like the tip of
an iceberg, "Moneyball", using the minimum words, speaks out the
maximum.
After the extremely witty but dialogue-heavy, straightforward and gimmicky (in
terms of script) "The Social Network", Sorkin shows what he is really
capable of.
"Moneyball" is also about each of our disabilities. We are all
disabled in someway or the other. And the world makes us much more disabled by
looking at and harping at what we cannot do, instead of seeing us for what we
can.
It`s like a guy in a wheelchair. We don`t see what that guy could do. He might
be the greatest writer in the world, or like Stephen Hawkins, the greatest
living scientist. But we judge him by his wheelchair and blurred speech.
Hence when Beane refuses these conventions of `success` and instead takes on the
`weaker` player and concentrates on what these players `can` do, he breaks the
cliche and prejudice against the also-played players in any game, and thus
against all of us.
The story thus becomes a metaphor for a true and successful society which can
achieve its potential only when we see in each one what he or she can do,
instead of harping on what they can`t. Like Einstein tells us, let us not judge
a fish on his ability to climb a tree. Society, like most games, is also a team
sport.
It is one of the greatest sports film because it puts the spotlight back on
`team` in a team sport. It is one of the most disgusting spectres of life to see
individual players in a game given over-importance, while others are grossly
neglected. By removing stars from the game, like Beane does, much of the dignity
of a game can be restored. An idea whose time has come for cricket as well.
Based on a true story, Moneyball is a movie for anybody who has ever dreamed of taking on the system. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s and the guy who assembles the team, who has an epiphany: all of baseball’s conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane will have to outsmart the richer clubs. The onetime jock teams with Ivy League grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) in an unlikely partnership, recruiting bargain players that the scouts call flawed, but all of whom have an ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. It’s more than baseball, it’s a revolution – one that challenges old school traditions and puts Beane in the crosshairs of those who say he’s tearing out the heart and soul of the game.