ITALIANO wrote:Like The Help, Moneyball is a move made by Americans for Americans (it's a big flop here in Italy - I don't know about the rest of Europe). Even more than The Help, it's about something that not only I'm not interested in - something that I don't know ANYTHING about, even. What is this baseball? What are its rules? What is a base, what is a home run? Ok, someone launches a ball, someone tries to hit it with a bat, someone runs... but why? What's the logic behind it? And why are Americans so obsessed - not with the sport itself, but with MOVIES about it? Frankly, it's such an ugly game. Soccer is much more beautiful, still there have been only very few movies about soccer in Italy or in Europe - and they all made no money. But in America movies about baseball are generally commercially successful. Why? I'll never understand it.
Any sport has its own kind of beauty & appeal - otherwise it would be impossible to survive as a big spectator sport. (And baseball's popularity has crossed far more borders than has, say, American football - so something about it appeals to more than Americans. Also, I say this as someone who loves soccer most of all sports, and doesn't like baseball much at all.) But why do
movies about baseball endure, and what endears them to the US populace? A lot of it is only marginally connected to the mechanics of the game itself - it's about nostalgia & iconography (popcorn at the baseball park, the worn-in glove, dandelions in little league outfields, et cetera). If one pushed a little further, perhaps we could say that since in most baseball plays only a small portion of either team is ever "actively" involved, the form of the sport allows for an interesting vehicle for the glorification of the talent or the accomplishment of the individual. (This may also explain something about the difficulty of combining soccer & conventional narrative ...)
All this, of course, makes Moneyball a good movie, not a great one. And for example, I might be wrong of course but... are Americans really THAT intelligent? Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the Americans on this board, or even about Americans in general - but Americans into sports, for example, those who work in baseball - can they really understand the meaning of words like "metaphor"? I honestly doubt.
For what it's worth, Noam Chomsky at some pointed noted how Americans routinely display thoughtfulness & awareness when it came to analyzing sports, but were encouraged to show no erudition or critical thinking when it came to politics or economics. (That said, sports punditry seems to be a realm of media experience populated almost entirely by idiots who think that analytical thought is a "competition" where the loudest and most obstinate person "wins" - and this much seems to be at least as true in the UK and the US, and wouldn't surprise me if it were generally true in most places now.)
Though yes, there are a number of Americans who make decent salaries and also know the meaning of "metaphor."
It IS, of course, a masterpiece compared to The Help - but then which movie isn't? It's not less American though, in its obsession with money, for example. At one point a character says to another - seriously, and this is the message of the movie - something like: "If you get paid lots of money, it's because you are worth it". Do Americans still believe this? Well...
Probably the movie is tapping - in a relatively low-key way - into the fantasy of meritocracy, which is why baseball (such an iconically, nostalgically "American" phenomenon) is a decent fit for a movie of this kind. And the spread of actual "moneyball" policies in sports is itself a kind of underdog story, as the film itself narrates - which involves the
circumvention of certain salaries because market hype is not as efficient as good-old can-do stastical spiritedness, embodied here as Jonah Hill who is not so far removed from Jesse Eisenberg's "type" in
The Social Network. (Though nuances of this story may be less clear to people who don't have at least a passing familiarity with Major League Baseball.) I think in the end this makes for a very comforting message that all these quantitative restructurings of how our businesses & markets are run might not be so bad after all - a subtly conservative, or at least quietist, moral.