When Statistics Became Sexy.

Brad Pitt ends MONEYBALL with, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” which is ironic, because he just spent the whole movie deconstructing The Great American Pastime’s romanticism with “sabermetrics” (a clinical mathematical process that focuses purely on statistics to choose players), wheeling and dealing at the highest levels of the baseball industry with wrath-of-God money, and buying and selling players like sides of beef. So romantic.

Pitt plays the real life talent buyer for the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, who was awarded a baseball scholarship for his unlimited potential in all disciplines – pitching, hitting, fielding – which proved to be a bust. He just didn’t have the follow through. Now in his late 30s, general manager of the A’s, he finds himself taking advice from the crotchety old men on his board, trying to beat the big-budget teams on their own ground – by buying superstar players, with no budget to speak of. In desperation, Billy latches onto a statistics whiz-kid, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), whose advice seems to be working for other teams with minimal budgets.

Brand’s strategy is not to be distracted by the glam value of players (“Does he have a good-looking girlfriend?” “Is he a drug risk?”), but to go deep into their stats (How many times do they get on base? How many walks can they accrue?). Beane and Brand put their counter-intuitive strategy into motion, raising eyebrows within the Oakland board on why certain non-glam players are making it into the team, not least the ire of coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman in a small but brilliant performance).

The strategy works. While it was being implemented, the crotchety old men resisted, their excuse: that it was threatening the game, but it was really a threat to their livelihoods; all the experience they had accrued over the decades being discarded. Oakland A’s would go on to win a record 20 games in a row at one point. When asked why he was still morose, Beane tells Brand he cared nothing for the money, the records, the rings, “If we win on our budget, with this team, we’ll have changed the game.” He wanted a sea-change, he wanted baseball to be regarded from this statistical angle, undervalued players chosen on their merits over the glamour boys…

Be careful what you wish for…

MONEYBALL shows us the genesis of the strategy that now informs all baseball drafts. Beane’s methods worked so well that he shot himself in the foot. Whereas he once had an intellectual advantage over the big budget teams, when the big budget teams did in fact adopt his methods, they then also possessed his strategic expertise PLUS big budgets!

“Money can disregard what baseball likes and dislikes.”

Directed by Bennett Miller (from the book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game), MONEYBALL’s performances are naturalistic method with unobtrusive camera. Hill keeps it straight, and Pitt keeps it grounded. The scenes around the scout table arguing player merits are like real meetings, with overlapping dialogue, occasional stammering, and straightforward discussion even when perturbed. Who are these fantastic old guys, and why don’t they seem like they’re even acting? One scene between head scout Ken Medlock and Pitt illustrates perfectly that unspoken fear of becoming irrelevant, and the exemplary naturalistic acting, as a talk about destroying the team turns into a quick exchange of blows, Pitt pushing the frustrated, jabbing Medlock away from him. It’s not “movie fighting”; it looks like a real case of someone getting jabby and being shut down.

How do fans keep any loyalties to their teams with all the players being swapped so often and nonchalantly? And so obviously for money? And when a ball player you worshiped is suddenly sold to a team that is playing against your home team, what then? And if you do in fact find baseball romantic, isn’t all this shuffling of players in a meat market more like one big gang bang?

END

The movie about the book about the murders.

CAPOTE, first of all, is not a biopic. It covers a short period in writer Truman Capote’s life when he immersed himself in his classic True Crime novel In Cold Blood, the first “non-fiction novel” of its kind. Published in 1965, this revolutionary book would make Capote the most famous writer in America. And it would suck his soul bone dry, as he never completed another novel before his death in 1984.

Directed by Bennett Miller, CAPOTE follows Truman Capote (a trimmer Philip Seymour Hoffman, putting on that outrageous accent and playing fruitier than even his drag queen in FLAWLESS) as he interviews the two killers of the Clutter family in Holcomb Texas in 1959, Richard Hickok (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). He lightbulbed on the idea of a book which would reveal their psyches, as well as the reactions of the townsfolk and the detectives who eventually caught the two killers, led by Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper), but didn’t bargain on the research being a heart-sickening exercise that would take nearly six years of his life, test his skill as an author and his very humanity.

This movie is not taken from Capote’s book In Cold Blood, but rather from a section of the book by Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography, written for the screen by Dan Futterman.

Viewing CAPOTE or reading In Cold Blood reminds us of that scientific precept that states you cannot observe a system without becoming a PART OF that system and thereby affecting the outcome of your observations. (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.)

Upon inserting himself into the story, by becoming so close to the killers that he actually hired powerful lawyers to appeal their cases to the Supreme Court, Capote affected the outcome of his novel; a tale that would keep stretching into the future with no end in sight, because he envisioned the hanging of the killers as closure.

Capote (author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958) was completely stymied on how to psychologically deal with this new form of fiction he was pioneering; he found himself split into two mental halves – one half empathizing somberly with the quadruple-murderers, while the mercenary side of him surreptitiously picked their brains for book material. Though he admitted a kinship with Perry Smith (“It was like we were raised in the same house, and one day he got up and walked out the back door, and I walked out the front”) he would continually lie to him about the book’s details.

After four years of stays of execution, it was Capote who was having nervous breakdowns because the killers were not being executed. Ergo, his book was in limbo, remaining unfinished. When Perry pleads with him to acquire another lawyer, Capote writes back tersely that he cannot find one. It’s a morbid conundrum, as Capote finally wants them dead and so must remove himself from the equation.

Catherine Keener plays Capote’s childhood friend and confidante, Nelle Harper Lee, whose own book, To Kill a Mockingbird, is published during this period. Only she can tell him truths about himself with impunity.

One of the best features of this movie is that, while Capote was openly gay, he is never turned into a punchline – not by the high society depicted in the movie or by the makers of the movie. He lived with his lover (Bruce Greenwood) with no ostracism from the entertainment world. Though he was renowned as the life of any party, we only see snippets of his gregarious night life in CAPOTE.

Movie is slow-moving but not boring, rather, introspective and disturbing. When Perry is eventually hanged, Capote’s tears are not so much for the loss of the man whom he had grown close to, but for the fact that Capote himself could have stayed that man’s execution indefinitely if he had chosen to invest in more lawyers; his tears are rage against his own selfish agenda in wanting to complete his book.

Capote expressed no joy at the publication of In Cold Blood, feeling like his soul was sold for its research.

We feel just as soul-spent by the end of this dark, somber film.

END