The other night, I convinced my wife to join me in watching a sports genre film, specifically a baseball movie… I sold her on the fact that it starred Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Done. Thanks goes to the casting agent for making this the easiest sports movie to sell your wife on.

Sidenote: My favorite baseball team (of all time) is the Oakland Athletics… stemming back to my childhood and the fact that I was raised in Hayward, CA (a suburb of Oakland) and got to walk around The Colosseum with my Little League team on my 8th birthday… plus the fact that it is my Grandpa’s favorite team, so it’s kinda in the genes.

Anyway, I was ecstatic to see the film, mainly because it chronicled the 2002 season, in which the Oakland Athletics lost their top three producers from the previous year (Jason Giambi, Matt Damon, and closer Jason Isringhausen) and had to completely re-haul the team. Utilizing free agents and their own young farmed talent (notably, Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder three aces that were completely left out of the movie even though they combined to go 57-21 for the A’s in 2002). A team that managed a 20 game regular season winning streak finishing atop the AL West, and ultimately losing in 5 games to the Minnesota Twins in the AL Divisional Series, of which Jason Jackson and I traveled 900 miles to see game 3 and 4 at the Metrodome in St. Paul (See below):

Rabbit Trail: Any baseball fan with a brain knows, inherently, that the writers of MONEYBALL took some liberties with the facts in creating this adaptation. MONEYBALL is not a documentary, as they created characters, squashed timelines, and amalgamated actual events to shape a compelling story. So, don’t go to it thinking this was exactly how it happened… there were a lot more factors at play then the mathematics that made this team dominate in the stretch.

Back to the actual movie… All I can say is, I’m glad Brad Pitt stuck with the film as it went through three directos finally landing Bennett Miller. His vision of how the book/screenplay should be executed (based on Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball along with writers Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin‘s work on the screenplay) was the right way to go as he used masterful dialogue and pacing to help the slow moving film (comparative to the genre of baseball/sports films) go from a yawnfest to a film with actual tension and grit. I think one of the many things I loved about the film was how it was really a throwback film to the 70′s era when characters didn’t necessarily change, but the environment/backdrop of the money made a slight transformation. This was done masterfully as we follow Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), fictional character Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) move throughout the film with generally no transformative character arcs in the script. It’s not a movie about redemption, nor is it a underdog story in the classic sense where the team wins the World Series, rather it is an underdog story that let’s us in on the underdog’s mentality and the lengths to which they innovate to succeed, while failing all the while.

The three main actors in this film do a masterful job of subtlety and wit to portray these characters, Pitt’s nuance as Beane is spot on, while Jonah Hill shows a side of himself that is untapped and beautiful. Hoffman is brilliant as the brooding Manager Art Howe, showing that truly great actors don’t need a lead role to steal the scene.

Oh, and this film is made even more epic by the addition of THIS WILL DESTROY YOU‘s song “The Mighty Rio Grande” as the golden thread of music that carries the viewer in pivotal scenes.

I’d encourage you to go see this film and let it speak to your inner underdog… What are you passionately fighting for in your life and is money the end goal or something else less tangible?