Follow the "Moneyball" Connections

First, a disclaimer: a few months ago I asked if anyone actually goes to see movies in the theater anymore, and now I must confess that I just did. The other day I bought two tickets, a bag of popcorn and a box of Milk Duds and spent the equivalent of a month’s wages in many developing nations. But I wanted to see Moneyball that bad.

Here’s why: I had heard that Moneyball was a good movie, and I had read the book it is based on several years ago. But the book was recommended to me as sort of a “here’s a great read that happens to be set inside baseball but it’s really about organizational life, and how to change a corporate culture and how to think outside the box.” That stuff is interesting to read and contemplate, but not the sort of thing great movies are made of. I mean, we’re still waiting for the movie version of Who Moved My Cheese, aren’t we? The relevant question I heard asked before the release of Moneyball was “how do you make a movie about an idea?”

How you do it is get Aaron Sorkin involved. He wrote the final version of the screenplay. Do you know his credits? You should. He wrote A Few Good Men and The American President and gave us the television series The West Wing. On top of that, he just wrote The Social Network and the similarities with what he did with that material and Moneyball are striking. He made both movies about the people more than the ideas. The ideas are there, but it is the people and their human connections that interest us.

In the case of Moneyball, what captures our hearts includes the character played by Jonah Hill, a stat geek who suddenly is in a position of power in the select world of major league baseball. The nerdy kid the jocks would have made fun of or simply ignored now is deciding their fates. That’s compelling. The driven nature of the character played by Brad Pitt, who washed out as a baseball player and has a chance for redemption as a baseball executive, also interests us. As does his impossibly sweet daughter and the back story of Pitt’s character trying to be a good father after a divorce and the subsequent loss of custody. Sure, there is baseball, but the human connections are the stuff Moneyball is really about. Aaron Sorkin understands that most normal humans don’t care that much about baseball. (I know, I know, I’m not normal.) What normal people care about are other people and their stories, all of which shed light on what it means to be a human being. As my literary and theological hero Frederick Buechner says, “The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.” I believe we learn and feel what it means to be human most through our relationships – our human connections. So, abnormal person that I am, Moneyball had me on three levels. I care about the human stuff and the baseball stuff and I also care about movie connections.

If you want to pick a good movie, look for the connections. The movie trailers rarely tell you who wrote a film, but do some research and find out. See if you liked their previous work. The author of the book Moneyball also wrote The Blind Side. The original scriptwriter for Moneyball also wrote Gangs of New York. Moneyball apparently had some pre-production problems and Aaron Sorkin was brought in to right the ship, but you can already tell by the pedigree of those who had started the project that he had good material to work with.

I see all sorts of other movie connections, too. The director of Moneyball directed Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, so we know he knows how to get a great performance out of Hoffman, and he succeeds again. We saw Moneyball with friends, and after the movie my friend simply could not believe that the actor who played the team’s manager was the same person who played Truman Capote. Then I mentioned Robin Wright, who was in Empire Falls with Hoffman and does a good job playing Brad Pitt’s ex-wife here and said, “You know her, she was Buttercup in The Princess Bride and Jenny in Forrest Gump.”

My friend said, “Buttercup was Jenny in Forrest Gump?” with a stunned look on his face, so stumped by that old connection that he seemed unwilling to contemplate or believe this new one.

Believe it – and follow the connections-- both in life and at the movies.