Moneyball

(Brad Pitt/Moneyball, 2011)

        

          All you need to make a baseball movie is a ball, a bat and statistics. Those are, in fact, the principles Brad Pitt’s character Billy Bean operates on in Moneyball, and apparently the principles actual baseball operates on, to boot.  This isn’t even a case of art acting as a simile for reality, either, because Billy Bean is a real man—a baseball player turned one-time manager of the Oakland Athletics—and, as we all know from the many baseball movies that have been thrown at us, and from being in America, the idea that baseball might even be a mere slice of existence is absurd. Field of Dreams, For the Love of the Game, Angels in the Outfield all said the same thing: Baseball is existence.

            Fine, so it’s the grandest of all metaphors. But even taking a game as some kind of sacrosanct truth means not simply fawning over it—it means getting down and dirty with each pitch, each glove, each bench-press and each character. In the latter category, at least, Moneyball does do its best. Billy Bean is trying to start a team on a tiny budget of $39 million. In the first skip of shots—director Bennett Miller somehow gets his film to skip across the screen—Billy is on the phone in seemingly every other one. He’s trying to hire players, make bargains, get cheap trades. He’s piecing his team together like any businessman would. He encounters a young scout at an early meeting named Peter Brand and, impressed with Brand’s diplomatic skills, hires him. Together they develop a statistical system of hiring players who perhaps don’t have great batting averages, but can nonetheless make it on base well enough, ultimately leading to more runs. And with a little thrift and lots of practice, any team can be a success, right? At first it seems, no way. Bean runs up against his fair share of insider opposition. Art Howe (the wonderful Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a seasoned Athletic’s coach who does not particularly care for Bean’s game-altering ambitions and tells him so. Commentator after commentator says the same thing; Bean doesn’t have it. His experiment is failing. They are only backed up by a prolonged losing streak that frames the first half of the film. And in the film, even if most of the games look green-screened, even if there is an overabundance of slow-motion and archival footage to cover for not much actual shot footage, there is always Brad Pitt—his head in his hands, his daughter looking concerned as they eat dessert—to show us the plausible essence of a baseball character: nervy, fast, in mid-leap in the training room, smirking in the office, head in hands when the other team is cheering. It was never even a metaphor for this snappy, easily bruised man.

(Jonah Hill/Moneyball, 2011)

            The most obvious criticism one could direct at Moneyball—that it’s a movie only fully understood by baseball fans—is, to be fair, not a good one. The pace at which the narrative moves, the craft of the whole piece (particularly the montages, which feel like echoes in a stadium) is too solid for the non-fan to walk out on. The deeper problem is the deeper problem with all sports movies, at least all American sports movies. Since sports are life to so many of us, then a sports movie is really a big, booming piece about everything we could possibly love. Moneyball first thinks it’s a hard-nosed walk-through course in team management, then it thinks it’s the same story we, as Americans, love to hear every single day. A story about individualism and refusing to cave in, and being right when everybody around us is wrong, and moving as fast and as physically and as literally as possible so that even when we fail, we still succeeded at something. This story, as played out in sports movies, is a more pragmatic version of Atlas Shrugged. Yet there are times when Moneyball actually seems to doubt its own protagonist. Whenever Philip Seymour Hoffman appears, slouching in a dugout, or hobbling around in an office, we immediately want to hear his side of the story. At one or two points, Miller and the screenwriters make us think we will hear it, but then it’s moving on, nothing to see here. There are scenes with distraught or confused players, questioning why Bean does not even fly with them, leading the viewer to believe Bean may learn one of those tear-jerker lessons about being more of a comrade and less of a cold fish. Nothing of the sort ever happens. The set up is that the individual knows what he’s doing and will succeed, the development is that the individual still knows what he’s doing and it’s exactly the same thing, the payoff is the individual has done that same thing to the ends of the earth and succeeded. Where is the subversion in this story? The movie sometimes plays as if it wants to be seen by businessmen more than sports fans, as some kind of manual for the rugged individual. The problem with this narrative is that it excludes too many viewers. Not just the skeptical and the sentimentality-averse will turn their heads; so will the discerning sports fan. 

            When it isn’t an individual-triumphs over all story, Moneyball is comfortable with being a regular baseball movie. At the risk of veering in to another obvious criticism, this means it willfully turns in to the sort of movie we’ve all seen before. Brad Pitt throws things and points fingers at people in desperation. An older, confident player learns to be a “role model” to a younger, less confident player. The soundtrack goes silent as a ball speeds in slow-motion towards a batter, wincing against the stadium lights that represent all eyes and expectations. A semi-militaristic, semi-gatorade-ad type score underlies all the crucial scenes. It’s the  dead images of the sports movie that still look technically beautiful, but lifeless by every other standard. Yet it is doubtful Hollywood will give up this formula any time soon. It will keep churning out these movies in which sports are so much more than just sports. But these are curveballs that no longer fly.

 

           

The Guard

(The Guard/2011)

“Go to America, to your appropriate fucking Barack Obama.”

            These are “The Guard” Gerry Boyle’s (Brendan Gleeson) words to a young cop as they uncover a dead body in a cabin by the side of the road, and as the young cop suggests that Gerry’s methods may be…inappropriate. So begins The Guard, writer-director John Michel McDonagh’s riff on the police procedural buddy-comedy. The problems with Seargent Boyle, a curmudgeonly cop with a sense of humor on the Mickey Spillane side of political correctness, only stack up from there: his Mother is dying, he’s slouching on his duties, he drinks too much, and he’s a bit fond of call girls. But the larger problem is not with him, it is with McDonagh, who can’t seem to decide what riff he’s trying to do, or what a true buddy comedy entails.

            Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) from the FBI soon enters, unintentionally offering Boyle a chance to get some real work done.  He has tracked a group of cocaine smugglers to the Irish coast and needs the cooperation of the local police force. Boyle is more interested in cracking racist jokes in Everett’s presence and sitting in the local pub drinking himself away than actually helping solve the case. But like it or not, he gets dragged in to it, mainly by virtue of having discovered a presumed-living member of the group dead before anybody else. He doesn’t quite know what to make of the highly professional Everett, but neither Everett, nor we, know what to make of Boyle the whole time. Is he an actual racist, or just a nutty subversive? Does he really not give a damn about tracking down hoodlums, or does he simply give a damn in his own, strangely methodical way? As Everett sums it up, is he incredibly smart, or incredibly stupid?

            McDonagh leaves us to decide these answers for ourselves and instead homes in on the theme of American attitudes versus the attitudes of the Irish. Everett is can-do and spirited, while Boyle is cynical and complacent. Everett is polite and censored while the two concepts don’t quite occur to Boyle. But if this is meant to be a broad satire of two cultures—or maybe just one—it doesn’t have solid enough groundwork. McDonagh simply doesn’t appear to have a thorough understanding of his chosen genre, or even what that genre is. The actual police procedural—the sleuthing, the clues, the suspenseful pursuits—are given far too little time, either because McDonagh hasn’t watched enough cop movies or because he believes farcical humor alone justifies a farce (Or is it a satire? Or a buddy picture?) As such, there are laughs, but as a writer, McDonagh does not appear to have much talent beyond one-liners. And his mistake of turning every character that pops up in to a sort of grand, Swiftian comic icon eventually wears on the viewer. These icons include a young boy with a pink bicycle who won’t stay out of the road, an opportunistic photographer and an eastern European woman named Gabriela (Katarina Kas, an old-fashioned beauty), grieving for her cop husband who mysteriously vanished. Each of these people are forced to serve the comic tone of the film so heavily, that The Guard starts to look like some post-apocalyptic movie about an Ireland where humanity has been reduced to bitter, redundant humor.

(Don Cheadle and Brendan Gleeson in The Guard/2011)

            Sure, there are laughs. And there’s plenty going on in The Guard to distract us from whatever we don’t agree with. There’s commentary on rural Irish disdain for the cities, semi-serious introductions of death and depression, and striking vistas of the Irish coast; clumps of the greenest green layered in fog. But we’ll need another filmmaker to revisit this same territory with a sharper comedic balance, and a greater understanding of how to tell a story loudly and well. Could the seldom heard-from Bruce Robinson show up here sometime? Or the American Christopher Guest? Never mind; for tht time being, let’s go back to our appropriate fucking Barack Obama.

Youth in Revolt

Youth in Revolt is one of a number of films-- and television shows—that apparently is meant to evoke some sort of darkly comic and satirical world and ends up invoking a nightmarish, demented reality filled with people I wouldn’t go near even if I was wearing protective, anti-cynicism gear. The film could have been a Sundance winner, or a blockbuster, or any number of Hollywood comedies. It has it’s roots not so much in the foreign films it playfully deals with as in American Beauty and Fight Club: it is about a place (reality), which is funny and mock-able to a point, but ends up being vapid, uncaring and defeatist, because that’s what people are like anyway.

The film approaches us as a clever and outrageous take on the familiar premise of the dork who can’t seem to lose his virginity. Michael Cera plays that dork, named Nick Twisp here, a bored sixteen-year old suburbanite who lives with his flakey mother and her overweight boyfriend (Zach Galfinakis). Nick mainly prefers classic French films like Breathless to mainstream fare, and gets ridiculed for it. His voice-over narration betrays a sense of having cooled to the idea of humanity so long ago, it’s hard for him to even laugh at it; and in this sense the film is very honest in the way it fits voiceover with theme and content. Nick, his mother, and her boyfriend go to a lakeside retreat for the weekend where he meets a stunningly beautiful girl named Sheeny (Portia Doubleday), interested in all the same things he is and fed up with her Christian parents. Nick finds his optimism about his sexual inexperience rising. After he returns to his suburb, Nick sets about finding a way to move back to the lakeside retreat to be near Sheeny, even if there is the complication of her boyfriend, Trent. To get back out there, he will invent a suave French persona named Francois, who assists him in wrecking his mother’s ex-boyfriend’s car, so that his mother will kick him out of the house to go live with his father.

The rebellion implied in the title kicks in to high gear at this point, and it is a cinematic rebellion that bears some resemblance to—what else—certain Godard films in which the hero is on the run, the car is a central object, and the girl is always gotten; but not without a lot of postmodern cross-referencing to tag along. But while the parallels to Godard’s films are no doubt intentional, the tone of Youth in Revolt is not so much intellectually ballistic as it is rude, ironic and, well, predictable. Here we have a girl who acts so artificially hip and so teasing that we are ready to scold Nick for falling for her, beautiful as she is. Yet in Nick himself, we have a kid whose idea of revolt is to sedate his love with sleeping pills until she is expelled from her French-language boarding school. In his mother we have a woman unbearably trashy and self-centered and in Sheeny’s parents we have two obnoxious, shallow Christians. Grownups are a drag and kids are just unstable. The film depicts a world going to hell in a hand-basket, not an energized uprising.

Of course, you are meant to laugh at this. The film does manage to recognize the nightmarish of its humor to an extent. When Nick drives his car off a cliff only to crash it in to the shallow water below rather than sink it as he intended, the police on the other side see a confused kid wearing only boxers run up to the edge to see what has gone wrong, and it is an unexpected slapstick foible that manages to do the foibles that came before one better. And every scene with Fred Willard is a delight; as Nick’s hippy- activist neighbor who manages to get him out of one rough spot only to end up shirtless and zonked out on mushrooms later, Willard managed to squeeze a spirit in to the film that is not a pathetic caricature or a shallow pincushion; he is an earnest guy who is a total screw-up, in the great comic spirit that runs through Keaton and Sellers. Yet the other characters are not meant to amount to much, and as a result, the laughs may come up short or be stifled. This is a film that handles people callously, with cold hands. Perhaps this is best exemplified in the way that certain characters are picked up and then dropped, without any explanation or any sense that we should care; an Indian student whom Nick befriends and a grouchy girl who briefly helps him in his schemes are dropped off the storyline from a far greater height than Nick’s car was from the cliff. It’s also a great height to fall for American Comedies.