The 25 Best Movies of the Century: No. 14 - ‘Moneyball’

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0:40I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is 25 for 25, a big picture special conversation show about Moneyball. And how can you not be romantic about baseball?

0:58We are here live at the Music Box Theater. We've just watched this wonderful movie and let's talk about it briefly. I'll give some details for the audience, even though they've just sat here and watched the movie and watch the credits and they know everything I'm about to say. Hang with me. Directed by Bennett Miller, written by Stephen Zalian and Aaron Sorkin, originally to be directed by Amanda's beloved Stephen Soderbergh. We will get into that. Starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill. Who else is in this movie? Chris Pratt, Robin Wright, Spike Jones. PSH. Thank you, So Philip Seymour Hoffman, of course.

1:32God bless the dead. And this movie was, I'm serious. This is an Academy Award nominated film, considered one of the best movies of the century by many people, including us. It's been an object of affection and fascination on the show for years. Why did we pick this one? This is a passion project. And I just got to say, it did warm my heart. We did not announce what movie we would be screening before it started here in the Music Box Theater tonight. So you did not know. Did anyone guess? Raising your hands. Okay. Yeah. All right. I would say that's like 5 % of the room, which is good. Congratulations.

2:10You should feel good about yourself. Everyone wanted it to be the Dark Knight. Well, I think. Sorry, bros.

2:20Listen, I tried, but also I didn't try. Anyway, it really warmed my heart to hear a large room of people cheering, even if you were just being nice, when you realized that it was Moneyball. Because this is, it is one of my favorite movies, certainly, of the decade. And I do understand why it hits a lot of soft spots for me. but the best sports movie of the decade, one of the, for my money, the best performance by one of the great movie stars of our generation, written or at least half written by one of the great screenwriters of my life when he is being interpreted by other directors. Thank you so much.

3:03Please put a note in that. And, you know... What about being the Ricardos? Remember when I literally put off my birth of my child for one day to see whether being the Ricardos got nominated. It didn't. That's okay. And just at some point it is like the line of the movie, like how can you not be romantic about this movie, which is a lot of things that are not romantic. It's about math. It is about like a lot of math. And there are just a lot of numbers at screen all the time. Everybody in it's pretty angry and a little touchy and no one is wearing flattering pants. and it's just, I mean, it's really, really tough.

3:45And there is, and it is, there's a lot of archival, there are a lot of, it's very PC and I think the score is really magical, but it's, you know, it's not really swooning until it is. So it doesn't immediately jump out as a sentimental, just irresistible, classical sports movie, but to me it is. It's a weird movie. It's based on a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, which was a wild bestseller. I don't know if I've ever asked you, have you read the book Moneyball? No, of course not. Okay. Any Moneyball fans of the book? Yeah. You read it? Has anyone read Bill James? Yeah, Crickets. Okay. All right.

4:25We got one shaking his hand. I mean, Bill James was a great thinker about baseball. Other stuff, he's pretty weird. He's got a lot of feelings about who killed JFK. I don't know if people know that. Don't we all? Chris Ryan is in the room tonight. CR is here.

4:39and he is currently going through the deleted files to figure out who killed JFK. So he won't be with us tonight. He will be here tomorrow. I was like, so what you do is you just control F for things you're interested in. This was what we talked about at dinner anyway. And that's what a lot of baseball general managers started doing with Bill James when he was exploring saber metrics in baseball. The book itself is fantastic. It's like a genuine page turner. It kind of reads like a thriller, even though it's covering sports events that most people who are reading the book already knew occurred.

5:10The other thing about the movie and the book is that it's largely chronicling a kind of modest success at best, but basically it's another story about a loser. We just did Inside Llewyn Davis in this series, which was a story about somebody who doesn't quite fulfill his promise and become as famous as he hopes to become. Billy Bean still has not won a World Series. He's no longer the general manager or executive president of the A's. In fact, the A's don't even play in Oakland anymore. Yeah. And weirdly, this movie still has this incredible sentimental hold on us. Even like, I don't care about the A's.

5:41No. Like at all. But, you know, I think part of we like it because it is a baseball movie and you are a baseball psychotic. I do love baseball, not as much as Sean. But it is even beyond a baseball movie at this point. It is just sort of a pop cultural phenomenon. on. Like I, um, you know, I've sat and watched the Hatterberg home run cause I really wanted to see that with a crowd of people. And then the, the Brad Pitt head swoop up is like, it's a meme now at this point, right? You know, and it is. And, and now I think like the money ball of something or they're money balling this as shorthand for whatever.

6:18So it is, it's pretty weird that a nonfiction math and business text became like a very, a movie that was nominated for many Oscars and that is now pop cultural shorthand for, you know, whenever anyone's feeling misunderstood in the workplace. And it's just, yeah, you want me to talk? Yeah. When I point at you, yeah. Do you relate more to Billy or more to Peter Brand? Jonah Hill's character who was based on the real life figure Paul D. Podesta but slightly changed well I know you relate to Billy but I'm do you? or do you feel do you feel more like a Peter? to hear you say that I was never drafted by the Mets though I wish I was in many ways the Mets let you down every year so thank you yeah sorry if you're listening at home I'm wearing a Cubs jersey right now which was extra mean to Sean Um, yeah, go Cubs.

7:18Uh, sorry again about today. Amanda has allegiance to like nine baseball teams. I have renounced the Braves. Okay. It's not worth it. Um, yeah, but also, you know, when you're angry, you don't really speak and that's true. You snack a lot. I do love to snack. So in that sense, you seem pretty Billy, you know, I have a young daughter. There you go. Yeah. You want to talk about it? Well, you know, I don't think I really thought about the movie in that way when I saw it back when it was released 15 years ago. And now I watch this and this is a movie about like a dad who's kind of fucked up, you know, and who's not really coming to grips with what's actually important in his life.

7:58And he thinks that winning is everything. And he thinks that success and, you know, it's a character study about a guy who thought he was the prince who was promised and has spent his adult life reckoning with the fact that he was not. And so he's constantly trying to rebuild the promise that he thought he was going to achieve. And he can't. And he doesn't realize really that the promise is in his family and the daughter that he is a father to. And it's a very beautiful movie if you see it in that very specific respect. If you peel away the memes and he gets on base and Jonah Hill mugging while reading statistics off.

8:34Like if you peel all that stuff away, you can tell that the people who were drawn to this movie, Bennett Miller is not a sports movie hero. He's made two sports movies, but he's interested in people and characters. And that's obviously what drew Pitt to it. And it's just a very affecting story about the very unique relationship between dads and daughters. You have a very strong relationship with your dad as well. I did. I went to a lot of baseball games with him growing up. And I do think he likes this movie. We've had mixed results with him on 25 for 25 so far. but I do, I, I'm hoping that this gets a thumbs up.

9:05So he's been saying like you, the handmaiden, you guys suck. Has he been going on Reddit? Wouldn't that be incredible? I don't think he knows. Okay. Actually, maybe he does. Don't let's not go there. Yeah. Um, the other thing that's interesting about it as a sports movie is, uh, the big game is just like a winning streak game in the middle of the season. Yeah. There's no dramatic playoff moment where they're in the world series. They don't even make it to the world series, you know, and there are sports movies and baseball movies that have done that before. Like, you know, major league famously doesn't end with winning the world series, but the movie almost doesn't care if you don't get that.

9:46It's not really ultimately interested in that idea of success. It's about the idea of, it's about the, whether the success of the idea happens. The idea of like changing the way that people think about something that feels like dogmatic and systematic and breaking that down too, which is pretty heady for a, for a mainstream September release starring Brad Pitt. I give them an incredible amount of credit for. To quote Billy Bean, it has to mean something, but in terms of the actual baseball, it, you really, you only see the moments of failure throughout the movie with the, with the exception of the Hatterberg home run.

10:20But even even that streak, I guess, you know, they recreate and kind of put together some archival of of certain wins or victories or, you know, signs in the stands. But you don't see the 11 runs that they score. You don't see those first three innings. You only you sit through the like very punishing at like error after error after error. And the movie really is more interested in the failure, in the not quite getting there or, you know, what is what are we trying to get out of this or how can we punish you? It is like people are very mad in this movie most of the time. Yeah, I think there's something to the idea of being obsessed with your job and thinking that there is an inherent moral value in the work that you're doing.

11:08Even if you're what you're doing is kind of bullshit entertainment. I don't relate to this at all. um i it's amazing i can even enjoy this movie with that as one of its core ideas but like you can tell there are many shots of brad pitt looking into the middle distance pondering his lost fate yeah which sounds really boring sure and so is it why do you think that's it effectively works. Well, it's, it's a good face, you know, and I just, well, let's be real. I, I've slandered the pants, but everything else is working well, but I, understatement. Um, I think it's his best performance. And I think that some of it is that it does not ask him to speak as much as some other movies do.

11:58And he is very good at reacting or he's very good at looking, um, pissed or looking, like regretful or looking just like he would like to be somewhere else unless he's eating a Twinkie. And, you know, we talk about all the time that like movie star thing that you can't that he holds the frame. But this movie opens with a bunch of footage, old footage from the playoffs and then him sitting alone in a stadium, just turning a radio on and on. And it is riveting. And it's just because he can hold the frame. And he also, I think, found the right role in this of someone who is emotionally repressed, has a lot of things that he would like to change about his life.

12:52and it's also pretty physical. Like he doesn't have to play baseball in this, but it is very athletic. He is throwing stuff around a lot in it. And that is a good match for Pitt as well and a good match for the movie. Yeah, that Gatorade cooler takes a beating in that scene. I mean, the desk. Yeah. Incredible supporting cast in this movie. Some of you may recall Jonah Hill was not a dramatic actor as far as we knew before this movie. Easily best known as kind of an Apatow player off the huge success of Superbad. And he was Academy Award nominated for this role. He's a very unlikely person to be cast in this role, in part because if you've ever seen Paul DiPodesta, you know he's like a very tall, skinny guy.

13:34And in the version that Steven Soderbergh was going to make, Dimitri Martin, the comedian, was going to play the Peter Brand character. So Jonah is a really like a pretty hard pivot away from what they were doing there. But I think his comic timing mixed with a kind of like glazed over sincerity that he applies to this is like really helps the movie because Pitt really needs a foil because he's so restrained in his performance except when he's throwing things that he needs somebody who can like give him comic timing give him something to bounce off of constantly and they're well matched they respond to each other and and you can watch Pitt I don't know whether he's just like being entertained by Jonah or whether you know that is just really good acting he's a pretty good actor but you can see in the moment that, I mean, the movie is a little bit about them figuring out, you know, their little, their relationship and their mission together as well as whatever it is with his daughter.

14:29So they, yeah, they play off each other and he's just also very funny. So Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Art Howe, who also managed the Mets, by the way, and he sucked.

14:43Hoffman had acted in Capote, Bennett Miller's first narrative feature film and won an Academy Award for Best Actor for that role. And this is kind of a small role, kind of a nothing part on the page if you're not Philip Seymour Hoffman. And he brings a tremendous amount of gravitas and he looks like a baseball manager. There are a lot of baseball managers with that physique and that posture and that kind of glower that he brings to the table. And he's also really good because Philip Seymour Hoffman is not afraid of Brad Pitt. Like he is not intimidated by him. And there are a lot of scenes where they really have to openly share contempt for one another.

15:19You are outside your mind. And I love the series of confrontations that are written for them because Pitt is playing a version of himself, an overconfident movie star, and Howe is an overweight manager and the cheapest team in the Major League Baseball. And they have an unusual anti-chemistry that I think is one of the rare aspects of tension in the movie. There's actually not a lot of ultimate tension that isn't internal, that isn't born of life. Can Billy do it? There has to be some sort of foil for him going through the movie and, you know, Rudy Giuliani and the Yankees aside, like there's not a lot presented there.

15:57Yeah. You forgot Grady and we can't forget Grady and the rest of the scouts. Yeah. Those guys, which is another, just one of the great scenes of, of the 21st century. Um, do you, do you know kind of where we stand with baseball right now in this debate? Like, have you followed this? Have you been reading the Saber matricians? No, I haven't been reading the Saber matricians. So what I know is because I see you all of the time and I see Chris all the time and I live with one of your friends who's also sports obsessed. So it gets filtered. So I know that the so Moneyball went for all the other sports for a while.

16:33Right. And so like the stats wave went through. And now in football, you're always supposed to go for fourth down or you're never supposed to go for fourth down. Right. you're always supposed to but bill doesn't like that right because our boss bill

16:51that's good you got me um so yeah so there were stats and then people are like we've gone too far with the stats and then what are we so but i don't know where we are right now i would say we're somewhere in the middle right there we go you know the eye test still matters and it's interesting being about this movie grady fuston who is portrayed in the movie as the head scout of the Oakland A's who is unceremoniously fired for saying fuck you to Billy in the movie was a long time scout and minor league coach with the Oakland Athletics and according to him and some others was very supportive in real life of the revolution that Billy was trying to push with Paul DePodesta but for the purposes of the movie they needed like they took some dramatic license with that story notably Grady Fusen where everywhere he went after this he kind of flamed out every time trying to hold on to some of the old ways.

17:41But that is the other theme of the movie is, can you introduce new ways of thinking into these worlds, but not lose your soul? You know, what Grady Fuston represents is unusual. That's usually what the hero of a movie is trying to stand for, that we are about something and we can't, you know, get rid of it in favor of data and metrics and a kind of soulless approach. And weirdly, Billy represents something that I think like today, we're pretty skeptical of, we're pretty dubious of having our lives dominated by a data center if you've seen Eddington. God. Yeah, he was playing earlier today here at the Music Box.

18:20Playing here at the Music Box. Yeah, adapt or die coming from literally anyone else right now, we are allergic to. But I think, you know, the movie wisely softens it because it invents the Hatterberg character played by Chris Pat in one of his best movie roles, I feel confident and saying in public. So it's number one, Electric State. Number two, Jurassic World Dominion. I saw that. Number three is... Sure. Guardians 3, my favorite of Guardians 3. Yeah. The Tomorrow Wars 4. Right. Don't forget Passengers. Passengers 5. Let's keep going. Oh, you know, I never saw Garfield. Super Mario Brothers movie 6.

19:05Oh, he wasn't bad in that. Garfield seven. Yeah. Jurassic world eight. Uh, help me out here, folks. Someone yelled some bike wars. What? Bride wars. Nine. Thank you. Guys, we got to talk about bride wars. I don't like, I don't, I, you know, I understand it. We need that kind of representation, but also do we, you know, um, you know, I'm really excited to announce that, uh, we're going to wrap this episode up because we're about to The show number 13 on our list. Bride Wars. A great film about the bride industrial complex. What's it about? I haven't seen it. It's two best friends and they're getting married like close to the same time or is it the same day?

19:50Same day. I mean, that's not realistic. Dob mob. Thank you guys. And it's Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson, right? Anne Hathaway is in that movie? Yeah. And then Chris Pratt. And then who's the other husband? Who? Okay. All right. This is being recorded for a podcast. I need you to have your phones out with information quickly for us. Anyway, Chris Pratt Hatterberg is also, it's, he is both, I guess, this representation of the stats and also. He's a real person. But he's a real person and he is also a second chance. And you, you know, he also has one daughter who, you know, comes out in the crucial scene at the home and is like, Hey daddy, I love you.

20:35So, you know, it's like the themes are aligned. She's very cute. I hope she had a great Christmas. You know, so the movie is very smart in how it's constructed. And in order to soften what you're right is a lot of numbers. And it shows like a lot of numbers, just a lot of spreadsheets. This is must be why you love this movie. I relate to some of it. Yeah. It has a very curious production history, which I think is worth. isn't necessarily always worth talking about for these conversations, but for this one, it is, um, it was optioned, uh, shortly after publication and Stan Shervin was hired to write the screenplay.

21:14He very quickly moved on. They hired Steven Zalian writer of Schindler's list, you know, the night of the recent Ripley series on Netflix, like literally one of the, consider one of the most, uh, skilled screenwriters in Hollywood for the last 40 years. And Steven Soderbergh was going to direct that movie. Yeah. And Soderbergh's vision for the movie was really interesting. It was kind of like if you made Reds as a baseball movie, where he was going to use into camera testimony and real life people performing from the film. So Scott Hattieberg would have acted in this movie. Chad Bradford would have acted in this movie.

21:48A number of figures. I don't know. I think Brad Pitt was still going to play Billy Bean. Was David Justice going to be in it? But I'm sure David Justice would have been in it. And it was a very audacious movie that was still going to be an expensive studio movie. And reportedly Soderbergh three or four days before production added a lot of things to the script that included adding a lot more stuff about statistics. And Amy Pascal, who was running Sony at the time, said, what the fuck is this? This is unintelligible to regular normal moviegoers. And right before production, she put the movie in turnaround and paused it completely.

22:26Soderbergh walked away. He went off on his journey of making nine movies a year. and she hired Aaron Sorkin. And there was so much Sorkinian stuff in this movie that I have to assume is not there. And I'm sure that the dad-daughter stuff is a part of that. And I'm sure a lot of that, kind of the nobility of the work, which is so common in all of Sorkin's TV shows and movies, the idea of like just doing the thing in an honest and decent way. Sure, and also you find yourself at work and you find your people at work and your work is your, yeah, it is very Sorkinian. Again, I can't relate to the movie.

22:56No, it's true. I mean, not that that's not Soderbergh quoted either, at least in my understanding of him. You were describing the Soderbergh script to me yesterday while we were waiting for our flight at the airport. And, you know, the movie that we saw is not unlike what you described in that, I mean, it certainly still has a lot of math. Instead of people talking directly to the camera, it uses a lot of talk radio, but it does use a lot of archival of the real people. There is a recreated collage feeling and a good amount of math. No equations, I guess. But as devoted as I am to the Steven Soderbergh project, I am happy that we got the movie that we got.

23:40The thing that's fascinating about it is that Bennett Miller is hired after Sorkin completes a draft. And Bennett Miller, to that point, had made a documentary called The Cruise. How many people have seen The Cruise? Are you familiar with that movie? Speed Levitch who is featured in Richard Linklater movies it follows him and then he made Capote which was written by his friend Dan Futterman and then he gets hired to make this movie six years later with relatively little interest in baseball as far as I can tell but understands the character aspect of this beautifully makes this great film he makes Foxcatcher a four years later movie that no longer exists and which I kind of liked honestly but it's a little self-serious and then he has not done anything since.

24:23And I wonder if like the legacy of this movie is dimmed at all because Ben and Miller hasn't made a movie in over 10 years. Well, on our list, it's one of the rare movies that is not like, oh, this is this director's slot. Like Fox Cotcher was not in consideration. There's so much wrestling in that movie and some other stuff. Like what?