DVDs This Month: Moneyball, 50/50, Real Steel
Posted on January 31, 2012 by bob in DVD
Moneyball (PG-13) — 4 Stars for baseball fans (2 1/2 for everyone else)
Somebody up there must really like Billy Beane, as firmly proven in this fact-based drama. After washing out as a highly-touted baseball prospect, he found a job most fans and ex-jocks would kill for – general manager of the Oakland A’s. Despite their existence as a small-market team, forcing them to compete on a budget that’s dwarfed by the Yankees, Red Sox and others, the A’s made the playoffs in 2001 as the film opens. But they lost three of their top stars to higher bidders.
Charged with rebuilding for the next year, Beane defied all conventions of scouting by turning to a nerdy stats freak (Jonah Hill), who, as a disciple of Bill James and his Sabremetric analyses of teams and players, steered Beane into a number of counterintuitive roster moves. Early failures reinforced all the resistance to this new approach to winning, before the team started clicking, and living up to the actuarial predictions, and providing vindication for managing by math.
Besides his dream job, Beane is played here by Brad Pitt. Clean living clearly pays off. At least that’s the way it seems to one who’d be lucky if his own biopic role were filled by John Turturro, rather than Saul Rubinek. Envy aside, the script artfully mixes the off-field and historical backdrop for Beane’s gutsy moves in the 2002 season with the main theme and action sequences. Then-manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is not likely to enjoy his depiction, but most viewers – A’s fans and otherwise – will find a thoughtful insider’s view of The Show.
Highlights include the presentation of the team’s dramatic late-season winning streak, and a surprisingly effective understated performance by Hill, showing serious acting chops beyond the lowbrow comedy gigs that made him a minor star. Now he’s showing big-league potential, perhaps with more upside than Beane’s career as a player.
50/50 (R) — 4 Stars
Unless you’re producing a tear-jerker for the Lifetime Cable Network, disease movies are tricky business. Sugar-coating the course and effects of the subject illness can render the product anywhere from insipid to offensive – especially to those who’ve lived with that particular reality. As true as that may be for dramas, the juggling act is even harder for comedies. That makes this loosely fact-based account of a seemingly-healthy young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) shocked by the diagnosis of a rare, life-threatening spinal tumor such a uniquely satisfying film.
The humorous elements come largely, though hardly exclusively, from his best friend (Seth Rogen), as Gordon-Levitt copes with every aspect of adjusting to his condition, debilitating course of treatment, and their effects on everything he does, and all who know him. How to manage his parents’ reactions; how will his girlfriend handle such a drastic change in their still-emerging romance; how will he deal with chemotherapy and its side-effects; who can he count on; what can he expect of himself; most importantly, will he beat it or die before 30?
As bleak as that all sounds (not even counting the overcast skies of its Pacific Northwest setting), there’s plenty of heart and humor in Will Reiser’s screenplay that feels completely natural to the premise, with no forced antics or gimmicks to artificially lighten the tone. That adds up to one of the year’s more impressive writing performances, worthy of consideration during Awards Season.
Real Steel (PG-13) — 3 Stars
This near-future sci-fi drama may look in the trailers like a dystopian high-tech noisefest. The premise is pro boxing, in which human pugilists have been replaced by gigantic humanoid robots, making some sort of convergence between gladiators and monster trucks the rage of the day. Hugh Jackman stars as an ex-boxer who never quite made the Big Time, scrambling to eke out a living by operating whatever level of fighting ‘bot he can patch together from a shoestring budget and the scrap heap. His role is not only underdog, but undermined by extensions of the internal demons that short-circuited his promising ring career.
After setting up the fighting and financial plot points, the story adds the existence of an eleven-year-old son he’s ignored while traveling to low-level arenas. His ex and her hubby have vacation plans, leading to a summer visitation deal with plenty of misgivings all around. That shifts the essence of the story from the hustlers and mayhem to a father-son learning and bonding experience.
The script derives more from Shane, Rocky and The Champ than from Mad Max. If you can suspend enough disbelief for all the required logical and temporal stretches, the result is a surprisingly effective couple of hours, engaging on both the f/x and sentimental levels. There are few surprises in the story arcs, but the inevitable climactic battle delivers all the literal and figurative punch that genre fans could wish for.
Mark Glass is an officer and director of the St. Louis Film Critics Association.
