The Dark Side of the Plate

Moneyball

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Bennett Miller

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt and Robin Wright

Running time: 133 minutes

From Gary Cooper’s teary proclamation that he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth to Kevin Costner hearing the ghosts of baseball’s past and building his own field of dreams, American baseball movies usually hit past our emotional fences. They are, essentially, idealized and romanticized love letters to an adored cultural pastime.

But if The Pride of the Yankees and Field of Dreams represent the pinnacle of sweet, good-natured, fundamentally all-American entertainment, then Moneyball may be the most terrible addition to baseball cinema one could conceive. It is a cold, cynical and deeply conflicted film about the value of the human spirit. In other words, it’s a business picture rather than a sports film.

See how in the film’s compound title that ‘money’ precedes the word ‘ball’? There’s a reason for that. Moneyball examines baseball not by the play-by-play on the field, but by the backroom deals that can ultimately guarantee that one team goes further in the playoffs than another.

Based off a compelling read by business and sports writer Michael Lewis, Moneyball begins with a playoff game between the New York Yankees (at that time, the richest team in baseball) and the Oakland Athletics (the poorest, with nearly a third of the earnings of their rival). New York eliminates Oakland, and then to sour the wound even further, begins pilferating the Athletics' top players for the next season. The Yankees can do that because their payroll allows them to.

Enter Billy Beane, the Athletics’ general manager, played by Brad Pitt. Devastated by the loss and having to deal with managing an unfair financial situation, Beane realizes that the only way to fight back against the baseball behemoths is through changing the approach to the game. "Adapt or die," he says to the team's coach in one scene. (The coach is played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who could have used far more screen time.)

While trying to raise some extra funding, Beane meets a patient but keenly intelligent sports analyst named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Brand explains to him how there are many undervalued players who have worth as competent athletes because they get on base, yet are marginalized by major league teams for small quirks and differences. These players are cheap to pick up but can deliver runs. Beane instantly hires Brand, and the two start to build a new approach to the Oakland franchise.

Brad Pitt is currently batting 1.000 in 2011 with an exceptional turn in this, as well as The Tree of Life. But for an actor whose youthful vitality shines through in many of his roles, he looks seasoned and contemplative here. Pitt takes the opportunity to explore Beane as a has-been trying to pursue a second chance in the major leagues. (Beane was a young MLB player in the 1980s but never reached the heights of his potential.)

Now, his redemption comes from organizing a team with players who are undervalued and under-appreciated. But, this is an underdog story that doesn’t come from the players’ perspectives.

Pitt is very natural in scenes with his preteen daughter (Kerris Dorsey), as well as when he develops a professor-protégé relationship with Brand. Meanwhile, Hill makes a nice transition to dramatic fare. It is fun to see how the stocky, awkward statistics expert develops into a major player on the Athletics staff.

Director Bennett Miller (Capote) intends to steer through the shreds of warmth and modest hope of the cold baseball empire. As a result, the film is not flashy—it rarely steps onto the field or shows any footage that would make it into a highlight reel.

Interestingly, Miller and writers Stephen Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin capture the human element of baseball in an ironic way: by focusing on Beane and Brand, who are essentially numbing the human spirit of baseball by bringing statistics and computer-generated analysis into play. The film analyzes baseball as a financial entity rather than a game.

Moneyball is a film that does not invigorate the love of the game but deconstructs it. It is a sad reflection of America’s pasttime at the current moment, and it explores this with nuanced performances and spare but powerful direction. It’s a very different kind of baseball movie, but also one of the finest sports films in recent memory.

Smack, Crack, Bushwhacked

Drive

*** out of ****

Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Oscar Isaac and Albert Brooks

Running time: 100 minutes

In the new pulpy noir Drive, our enigmatic driver protagonist played by Ryan Gosling throttles a Chevy Impala through the dimly lit Los Angeles streets. Like the car, the film looks as conventional as everything else on the road, but has a real roar underneath.

It is a standard action film with stock characters, but the artistic pretensions and slow-burn techniques from Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Best Director honours at Cannes this spring, ensures that the film is a step above the typical genre entry.

The driver that Gosling portrays is not given a name or much of a history. He has three jobs: a professional stunt driver for the movies by day, a getaway driver for inept criminals at night, and an auto repair shop worker on the side (his boss is played by the always-welcome Bryan Cranston).

He has also become attracted to a neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and enjoys taking her and her son, Benicio (Kaden Leos), on drives along the concrete L.A. River basins. When Irene’s husband (Oscar Isaac) returns from prison and gets mixed up with some shady mobsters—including a wryly funny and shockingly sadistic duo of Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks—the Driver must protect Irene and her son as the mobsters' schemes become increasingly convoluted.

Refn’s film oozes with a self-conscious sense of style, as if it knows it’s the coolest thing in the room. The synth-heavy soundtrack, neon text and the white leather jacket donned by our protagonist—featuring a gold scorpion on its back—scream for the galore of hard-boiled action pictures from the 1980s (Michael Mann's Thief is a good reference point).

The perplexing ambiguity and aimlessness of the protagonist speaks better to action-packed excursions from the late sixties and early seventies, though—think of the films that Steve McQueen and Alain Delon would be suited up for. But since the Driver resembles an action hero character more than a complete and absorbing human being, Drive would rather serve as a fascinating genre exercise than a character study.

Not that that’s a bad thing, especially considering how Refn experiments with the execution of action sequences. He (thankfully) excludes the chaotic frenetic energy that so frequently drowns out coherence in contemporary action cinema, and instead uses a variety of point-of-view shots, rhtyhmic music and tight framings to keep the action throttling forward without having to disorient the viewer.

Mostly, though, the film takes its precious time setting up each brutal murder. This teases the audience as to when the violent impact will finally be heard or seen, adding suspense and ensuring that the audience absorbs the details on the screen as they await the bloodshed.

When the action starts off, the results are nasty and overwhelmingly bloody. In one sequence, the driver shares a passionate kiss with Irene just seconds before stomping on a man’s face to the extent that nothing remains above his neck a minute later.

For a film that basks in a retro coolness and that is classily patient in how it executes pivotal moments of graphic violence, it is a bit shallow. The cast is uniformly excellent, but they can only do so much to make up for paper-thin characterizations, courtesy of screenwriter Hossein Amini (who based his material off of a slim James Sallis yarn). Even Gosling’s calm, knowing stare feels like a bit much to base an action hero off of at certain points.

Don’t go into Drive expecting a fourth Transporter film. Even though its roots in the action genre are apparent, the surprises lie in Refn’s storytelling techniques rather than the story itself. With such capable hands steering the action, the film is a smooth, if remarkably gory, joy ride.

Valuable Lessons of the 2011 Summer Movie Season: A Recap

Okay, so I have some good news and some bad news for Hollywood's behemoth studios. The good news is that admissions at the summer box office this summer were up from last year. More disheartening, however, is that this season marks the third least-attended summer session at movie theatres across North America since the multiplex boom started to take hold in 1997.

Between the highs and the lows, though, there were a lot of lessons that hopefully some studio bigwigs should take into account as they assemble future summer schedules. Note that my opinions on some of this summer’s films are interspersed within this recap.

Never Underestimate the Power of Women (also a good life lesson, in general):

Every year, the big studios carefully schedule around their prime programming, films with humongous budgets and the most lavish visual effects artistry that hundreds of millions of dollars can buy—and most importantly, appeal to young males. Then there are the executives who position ‘counterprogramming,’ also known as films that appeal mainly to women or older adults. This summer, the two most unprecedented surprises were both films under this ‘counterprogramming’ category, and both mainly appealed to older females. They were the hilarious Bridesmaids and the heartfelt adaptation of The Help. Both films utilized rich (and mainly female) ensembles to create fully-dimensional characters that both males and females could feel for and laugh at. Both Bridesmaids (***) and The Help (***1/2) relied on the concept of female camaraderie in their synopses, as well as their marketing campaigns. For the studios and the audience, it paid off in dividends.

Never Underestimate the Power of Nostalgia (but that doesn’t give you an excuse to make The Smurfs and other facsimiles):

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the protagonist played by Owen Wilson is working on a novel about a man who works in a nostalgia shop. Of course, this man is some variation of the Wilson character, and since the actor is playing the Woody Allen surrogate, it shouldn’t surprise you to note that the film is a highly romanticized look back at a time that has come and gone. By reminding us of 1920s Paris in the spring, Woody gave us his most adored film in more than a decade. On a similar note, J.J. Abrams’ blockbuster Super 8 was an endearingly composed Spielberg symphony, recalling the childlike whimsy and dazzling escapism that has captured audiences for generations (and will continue to). Despite my reservations on its hokey ending, I saw Super 8 twice—few films can encapsulate the thrills and raw affection that Spielberg’s can, and Abrams’ tribute came stunningly close.

Stop Overestimating the Power of Superheroes:

We got no fewer than four high-profile superhero films this summer (Thor, Green Lantern, Captain America: The First Avenger, X-Men: First Class) and none of them were exactly, well, memorable. Their box office takes were moderate at best for the subgenre, their stories were relatively standard, and despite impressive ensembles and effects work, they didn’t have a lot of heart. Then again, it’s hard to feel any majestic powers of superiority when you’re being pushed out of theatres by another superhero movie every other week.

What’s Going On in Sundance?:

The Utah festival has helped build buzz for some of our generation’s most defining films. Films like Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, The Blair Witch Project and Little Miss Sunshine have ridden their January buzz into big summer takes. This summer, not one Sundance premiere made much of a dent in the schedule. Of the three films that I saw—the sci-fi drama Another Earth, coming-of-age drama Terri and quirky comedy Submarine—none of them were good enough to recommend and are practically unheard of by mainstream moviegoers. Are studios beginning to lose faith in their independent divisions? Or are they saving the grand daddies for the fall season, with potential award gold on the table? Let’s hope that the latter is true.

Nothing Ruins a Grand Finale Like Too Much Exposition:

Yes, Steve Kloves, I’m talking to you. You wrote seven of the eight Harry Potter films, and saved the most disappointing adaptation for last. I know I’m in a minority who thought that Deathly Hallows: Part 2 was underwhelming, but considering how much of that book's final third was a tremendously thrilling action sequence featuring a echelon of beloved characters, why was there such little action and such constricted room to fit everyone in? The grandeur was there, but the excitement felt contained. Next time, Mr. Kloves, you may want to snip some of the leaden dialogue-heavy sections that turned one of the most anticipated finales in cinematic history into a mouthful rather than an eyeful.

Someone Needs to Take a Pulse on What People Find Funny:

Yes, Bridesmaids featured some of the funniest scenes of any film in recent memory. But if that laughter was medicine, it didn't make up for the excruciating pain caused by The Hangover: Part 2 and Horrible Bosses, my two least favourite films of the summer. One was essentially a carbon copy of the original, although with the inspired comedic bits strangely missing, and the second was a total waste of a terrific concept and a diverse, talented ensemble. What made these two films most alike, beyond the notion of having a trio of male leads to get themselves in particularly sticky situations, was that the shots of humour were foul and bleak. Both of these films lacked wit, heart and characters who resembled actual people, and were essentially works of mass vulgarity. When there’s such little truth to the humour, it’s hard to care about what’s onscreen and even harder to let out a laugh.

Let Terrence Malick Do His Thing:

The reclusive American artist and director of 2011’s best film, The Tree of Life, is one of the only filmmakers on the planet who is able to have their personal vision remain intact in the final cut. This may explain why his film was such a glorious, fascinating and transcendent piece of beauty and thematic complexity. Many found Malick’s cerebral, ‘sense memory’ approach to his tale of a small-town Texas family in the 1950s perplexing, while others (like myself) found it to be key to the telling of a triumphant coming-of-age tale that didn’t attempt to skirt with audacious themes and concepts. If only more filmmakers had the clout to take on such liberties with their work…