Moneyball
Based on a true story that captivated the nation in 2002, the film stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, a cooled-off hotshot who blew a contract with the Mets and isn't exactly making headlines as the Oakland Athletics general manager either. Then Pete Brand (Jonah Hill) comes into the picture, a bespectacled egghead of a young man who believes he can re-invent baseball with a simple plan: shit-can the sentimentality and recruit based on not star power or likability but concrete data. Computational analysis. Objective fact. Not surprisingly, no one, from the commissioners to the sportscasters to Billy's own coach Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), is a fan of said approach, and Beane and Brandt are left with the singular task of winning the series, and, by extension, changing the sport.
It's a conventional underdog's tale, that's for sure. But what it isn't is a sports movie. Yes, baseball is a prominent part of the plot, but to call it the movie's main focus is infantile and reductive--the equivalent of calling Nashville a movie about country music. This is a character study before it is anything else, and it rides on the shoulders of its cast. The story of the Athletics 2002 season is bursting at the seams with larger-than-life individuals ready-made for the big screen. You've got Brandt, a Yale grad alternately emboldened and embarrassed by his genius. You've got Howe, a seen-it-all survivor who treats the game like a lover who's broken his heart one too many times. There's Scott Hattenberry (Chris Pratt), an injured player whose recovery and athletic resurrection deserve a movie all their own. We have the old recruiters, who refuse to go gently into that good night, and view "moneyball" with a potent mixture of can't-help-it awe and lion-in-the-winter fury. But front and center, we have Beane, a charismatic catastrophe of a single fortysomething who embodies all that's good and bad about middle age. A drinker, a dreamer, a thrower of tantrums, and a deeply lost soul, he's the kind of character that comes with a little tag saying "Overplay Me!" Pitt knows better, and does his business with a quiet austerity that's at first off-putting but works wonders in the long run. If nothing else, Moneyball marks the final stage in his evolution from Brad the Body Beautiful to Brad the True Blue Actor; here he uses everything he's learned about life, love, and the cinema, to deliver a real knockout of a performance, one that shows off Billy's agreeable charm and commendable commitment to the game, but doesn't do away with the demons festering underneath it all. To paraphrase Hemingway, he has burned the fat off his soul, giving a performance that contains everything it needs and absolutely nothing it doesn't. Look at the movie's raw final scene and take a moment to realize that Pitt's been building up to it all along, not with the "a-ha" gimmickry of a cheap magician, but with the steady, unforced confidence of a ball player who knows he's got a home run in him. It's a career performance, and the other actors match him move for move--Hill reaches new heights by staying grounded, Hoffman breaks your heart and then patches it back together, and damn near every player on the team gets their thirty seconds to shine. Screen Actors Guild, pay attention.
Even if the cast is perfect, the movie isn't. Aaron Sorkin, the toast of the screenwriting community after his monumental Social Network, packs the film with his famed dynamite dialogue, but he also tacks on one of those flabby, multiple-ending finales. Some of the game-time scenes indulge in unfortunate running-man-in-slo-mo cliches, and Brand's game of numbers is often overwhelming and occasionally exasperating. Still, give Team Moneyball props--they've turned a story of facts and figures into an emotionally engaging work of flesh and blood. Here's a mainstream movie that steps up to the plate. Time for the rest of Hollywood to follow suit. B+.
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Drive
"I'm a fetish filmmaker", Nicholas Windig Refn declared in an interview earlier this year, and indeed, much of Drive is comprised of the director's almost obsessive attention to the little things that turn him on; fast cars, lonely heroes, and explosions of pent-up, impotent brutality. But for all the passion Refn pours into his American debut, it comes off like one of those sky-high-priced cars on display at an auction; sleek and impressive, but also more than a little remote.
There isn't much plot; we've got the Driver (Ryan Gosling), stunt double by day, getaway assistant by night. We've got Irene (Carey Mulligan), the dotty mother he befriends. And we've a couple of crooks (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks) the Driver gets all mixed up with as he attempts to protect both Irene from the wreckage wrought by her husband-with-a-shady-past (Oscar Isaac). As the plot stipulates, there isn't much to these characters, either. Mulligan furrows her brow alot and cries on command. Perlman does a decent Goodfellas impression. And Gosling just stares. And stares. And stares. I know, I know, by nature, the Driver is a mystery. But if you're gonna play the Enigma Game, you've got to find an actor who can convey everything that the writers leave out. Look at Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, or, more recently, Uma Thurman's bride. Because these actors specialize in finding hidden layers of meaning in conventional stoicism, their demeanor reflects that of a person, who, through years of hard living, have whittled themselves down to the essentials, carrying with them food and water and clothes and nothing more, not even their old nomenclature. However, while Gosling is more talented than any one human has a right to be, he can't play it straight; he gets by on his idiosyncratic charisma and puppy dog charm, which he maintains in even his grimmest roles (Half-Nelson, anyone?). Stripped of that singular it quality, he's got nothing to do but narrow his eyes and pout. It's like watching James Dean's mumbly, Method-ized work in the final 15 minutes of Giant, but for a full hour and a half.
So, with the skeletal plot and character development, what's left? Style. That's supposedly the picture's Big Draw, and it certainly has a look all its own, mixing Scorsese's Brooklyn immediacy with Bergman-esque European ennui, with a dash of Michael Mann's neon-jungle color schemes thrown in for good measure. It's a helluva movie to look at. Unfortunately, the mise en scene, gorgeous as it is, is at odds with the picture's thematic content; long, contemplative shots of seascapes and eyeballs and downtown LA have no place in a movie where death by fork is a viable possibility. Refn has a true, Cronenbergian gift for orchestrating outbursts of violence that hit so hard they seem to leave viscera splattered all over the cinema seats, but these moments are so awkwardly sandwiched between exasperating moments of shoegazing and deep-dish philosophizing that their power is dulled considerably. Only in the opening car chase does Refn successfully implement his aesthetic experiment.
Experiment. That's the best word to describe Drive, and it's why I don't regret seeing the picture, even if I was immeasurably disappointed. Refn isn't blending pulp and prestige in hopes of maximizing both box office glory and critical hosannas (I don't like that). He's an international man out to break down barriers between cinematic cultures, mix up the melting pots of modern moviemaking and create a heady concoction all his own. It's got a flavor like none other, even if you do want to spit it back out.
I should note that there is one truly great thing about Drive, and his name is Albert Brooks. He internalizes his famed comic exasperation and turns it into something deeper, truer, and scarier--existential fury. His character comes off like the movie itself--bold and brilliant, but destined to fall apart. C.
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