MONEYBALL: THE MOVIE

Moneyball the film is just as interesting for what it isn't as for what it is. It isn't a traditional misfits get together and start to win baseball movie, like Bad News Bears or Major League, though it threatens to become one at a number of times. And it isn't a particularly good explanation of what it is that Billy Beane bought into, and why it was so different to the rest of baseball. What it is, however, is a very good attempt at getting to the core of what Michael Lewis was writing about, which is Billy Beane and his character.

You probably thought it was about the economics, which is the point that people – especially baseball people-- always missed. Lewis was not saying that Billy Beane was the smartest guy in baseball, or that he'd found the best way to build a baseball team. Lewis was saying that Beane had realised something about the economics of baseball, and that if he were going to survive in Oakland, and produce a winning team, he would have to invest in those commodities that other teams undervalued. The film does a pretty good job of explaining that, though they basically boil it down to on base percentage and don't really show what that means.

But that's not the core of what Lewis wrote about. Lewis' theme, his persistent theme, is the maverick, the man who goes against the book, bucks the trends, follows his own drummer. He especially enjoys it when his maverick is obsessive, as Billy Beane is, and eccentric, which he also is, and the film is literally at its most successful when Brad Pitt's Beane gets to play off the stolidity of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Art Howe. That is the core of Moneyball, Pitt burning off energy on the stationary cycle in the bowels of the stadium while Howe sits impassively with his arms folded watching the season first collapse and then explode in front of him.

Moneyball might have been a more interesting film had Steven Soderbergh hung around to direct. The original adaptation was by Stan Chervin, the first screenplay by Steve Zaillian, and Soderberg's concept apparently would have included interviews, like Reds, and probably explained the baseball concepts behind Moneyball better. You can see the urge to make the film more accessible to folks who aren't baseball geeks, more like what everyone expects a sports movie to be, which is why the film as directed by Bennett Miller keeps edging toward those traditional tropes (and it's not just baseball, think of Hoosiers, or Miracle on Ice, or Bang The Drum Slowly, or The Longest Yard—all films about disparate characters learning there's no I in team--and that's why North Dallas 40 is such a good sports movie, because it subverts that entire message, and why it was so important in the original Rocky that Rocky NOT win) of the team that learns to play together turning into winners. But you can also see why Aaron Sorkin, who seems to specialise in making drama out of mundane non-fiction, would be find this story interesting, because his films are full of obsessives, misfits, and geeks, and also because Billy Beane is literally a Sorkin character come to life, full of fast-talking repartee, and every bit as driven, if not by the same drivers, as Sorkin is reputed to be.

Where the film lets down is in failing to make some of the obvious parallels stronger. Scott Hatteberg is a Billy Beane character: Beane's own career as a player stands as a monument to the ability of scouts to misjudge talent, or predict a player's ability to harness his own talent—Hatteberg's own doubts reflect Beane's and more might be made of that. Similarly, the film gets mawkish with Beane's daughter, but skips the potential for real conflict and literally ends with her offstage, speaking through a cheesy song she's recorded for him. They really need to explain Bill James more clearly, explain the Red Sox' John Henry and his attempted hiring of Beane better (Henry is given the film's 'hammer' (a phrase I coined in my book about Oliver Stone) speech, which hits you over the head with the movie's theme, in case you've been asleep for the past 80 minutes and missed it) and it would have been good to have answered the question of how, if Bill James was actually working for the Red Sox, Billy Beane was responsible for everything. It also would have useful to have credited Joe Morgan's gloating explanation of why Moneyball couldn't work, just so we could blame him for fatuousness.

It's also interesting that Jonah Hill is so obviously unathletic (until you see the film of A's extreme Moneyball propsect Jeremy Brown, a pudgy catcher who never really made it in the bigs, and he looks just like Hill) because Paul DePodesta, the executive on whom he's based, was actually a college baseball player at Harvard, so yes he was somewhat socially inept, quiet and self-effacing (which is why he didn't want his name used in the film, which otherwise uses real names throughout).

In fact, if Aaron Sorkin had got involved earlier, we might have been able to combine The Social Network and Moneyball into one movie, with DePodesta and Mark Zuckerberg duelling with their computers trying to impress Radcliffe girls. It's like Beane's the Rob Lowe character from West Wing, or maybe Josh, and Brandt is Toby. In Beane Sorkin gets to combine the handsome jock with the smart geek, and create an unclubbable god! In that sense Moneyball and TSN are the same movie, and end on the same note, with Zuckerberg and Beane both viewing or hearing the voice of their love, ex-girlfriend or daughter, who can't be with them. Sob.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: IDES OF MARCH

Sometimes it seems as if George Clooney wants to single-handedly re-interpret America's last great Golden Age in terms of the paranoid politics of today, as if to make the world safe for an heroic sort of Kennedy liberalism. Although he reached back to the Fifties to recast TV newsman Edward R Murrow as the forefront of the campaign against McCarthy-ism in Good Night And Good Luck, it's more instructive to see the CIA reduced to a Chuck Barris gong show, or Fail Safe's Col. Jack Grady given a conscience but still carrying a full payload of paranoia strong enough to conclude both the President and his own son are Soviet dupes.

His latest film, Ides of March, which received its world premiere at the London Film Festival is really a reimagining of The Candidate, which highlight the differences between Clooney the director/star and the approaches of both Michael Ritchie, a sharp social critic, as the Candidate's director and Robert Redford as its star. Ides transfers the focus from the candidate, Governor Mike Morris, played by Clooney, to his number two campaign chief, played by Ryan Gosling. In a neat transfer from The Candidate, here it is the political pro who is the idealist, who believes in the candidate, and the candidate himself is, at best, already a seasoned pol. But just as crucially, we can imagine Ides Of March's storyline beginning exactly at the point The Candidate ends, with Redford as Bill McKay, exchanging glances with the young campaign worker slipping into a hotel room. That moment symbolised McKay's corruption in the way American political films—and I extend this to documentary as well as fiction-- see their politics: in personal terms.

The difference between the two films is primarily that Clooney starts from an assumption that we all know our institutions are corrupt; he is building on the revelations which spawned films like The Candidate. That the professionals are running the show, that ideals are sacrificed on the altar of vote-getting expediency, a revelation in The Candidate, here is taken for granted. The play on which the film is based was called Farragut North, after a Washington DC street off K Street where lobbyists and consultants make their lairs. Therefore the crucial change of focus is from the candidate himself as idealist to the campaign manager as idealist—the somewhat contradictory idea that Ryan Gosling's Stephen Meyers is a ruthless professional who could be in this sleazy business for idealistic reasons. That he is out-smarted by Morris' opponent's campaign chief, Tom Duffy, played by Paul Giamatti reprising Allen Garfield/Goorwitz's brilliant performance from The Candidate, is not a surprise; that the weakness on which Giamatti preys is Meyers' boss Paul Zara's (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) sense of loyalty—Hoffman in a sense is playing the Peter Boyle character from The Candidate, but he is playing it as PSH in standard mode. Although the term 'anorak' doesn't really exist in America, he wears one, and plays it as one; the most predictable scene in the film is the one where he gets the push from Morris. It's a shot of the car in which the dagger is being used, and when Hoffman gets out, and the car drives away, you can predict the slump of the body within the anorak.

Because this is America, the crucial betrayals are not political but personal—and it's hard to figure out whether Meyers is more incensed because Morris is shown to have sexual feet of clay, or because Molly, the campaign intern he's sleeping with (Evan Rachel Hunter) has 'cheated' on him. Intern sex reflects the post-Clintonian reality of political morality, which is specifically referenced twice: first when we learn the Republicans are more ruthless, better organised than the democrats-better at the process of politics, the perennial lament of the headed-for-extinction liberal. And second when we learn that the one unforgivable political mistake is 'fucking an intern'--all else, including starting wars, pales into insignificance.

That Meyers first lets Molly down and then appears to threaten her with exposure causes her suicide, and puts him in the position to be able to blackmail Morris indicates the key thrust of the film. Although Clooney the actor handles Morris' 'reveal' brilliantly. It's always fascinating to me how powerful Clooney can be playing against type. He's our Clark Gable, but he has darker depths. And like Gable, he's not very good at comedy, though unlike Gable he keeps trying. Clooney the director isn't so subtle about the reveal: both Morris and Gosling's Steven are cast in half-shadow, to emphasize the duality of their positions, the choices they make. It's shot wonderfully by Phedon Papamichael, who alternates the styles of campaign documentary and neo-noir with aplomb. The film reveals its origins as a play – it is opened up but everything of importance takes place in small encounters, and the mobile phone plays an important role in delivering outside news. But the real point of the film is never politics, but love.

This is born out by Marisa Tomei's turn as Ida Horowitz, the obnoxious (and Jewish—pointedly so) reporter for the New York Times, who keeps telling people she loves them and reminding them that love means nothing. In that sense, we see Giamatti's seduction of Gosling as more telling than Molly's seduction of him, and we realise that Molly's weakness may well be believing in love more than politics. It is interesting that the scene in which Gosling rings least true in his role comes in the bedroom, where he's revealed to be far more buff male beefcake than you'd expect from a campaign manager—more American Psycho than American Politico. But again, that may be the point. And the reversion of Molly to helpless girl, female victim of morality (her family is Catholic) may well be more a comment on the false morality of American politics than an attempt to send the women's movement back to the Sixties.

There are a few practical problems. That Molly is the daughter of the Democratic Party's chairman means that Mike Morris would know her as well as Paul Zara says he does, and Stephen would likely be at least aware of who she was. Would Morris thus choose her to sleep with? After her death would no one do an autopsy that would reveal her recent abortion, and then check local clinics? Did no one ask Stephen why he happened to go to her room where she was found dead? Did no one try to trace her phone? But those are the kinds of question you'd ask in a crime film, not a political drama.

The revelation that politics are corrupt, or hypocritical, is hardly earth-shaking. It's easy to see Ides Of March as longing for some more innocent reality, but such innocence may never have really existed, we George Clooneys just believed it did because the media (and movies like The Candidate) hadn't revealed all to us. This film is earnest in its liberal way, well-played and well-made, but it really reveals very little.

Ides Of March directed by George Clooney
screenplay by Clooney & Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon,
based on Willimon's play, is on general release

MAURY CHAYKIN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the Canadian-American actor Maury Chaykin will be in Friday's Guardian; it's up on their website now and you can link to it here. It is pretty much as written, but with a number of small cuts made because of the page's obviously limited space, and a couple for reasons less clear, as when I said he died on his 61st birthday, which was changed to the usual 'died aged 61'. I just find something significantly touching about dying on your birthday.

The trims lost a number of small but I thought telling points about Chaykin, but included a fuller list of survivors than usual. If you're curious about the trimming process, here's the copy as I wrote it, with the missing bits in bold (some parts were re-arranged, including the cause of death and his posthumous credits):

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The actor Maury Chaykin, who has died on his 61^st birthday, was both an American and Canadian citizen, and his career reflected his dual nationality. In the US, he was a familiar face, if not always recognisable name, playing small but telling roles in major films. His breakthrough came providing one of the few moments of ambiguity in Dances With Wolves (1990), as Major Fambrough, who sends Kevin Costner on his frontier assignment, and then kills himself. His only leading role was in a cable TV series as the detective Nero Wolfe, who refuses to leave his house, leaving that to his assistant (played by Timothy Hutton). In Canada, he was something of a national treasure, winning the Genie Award (the Canadian Oscar) as best actor for Whale Music (1994), for playing a Brian Wilson-like burned-out rock star, and for remarkable performances in three films by Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, Where The Truth Lies, and The Sweet Hereafter). He also won two Gemini awards for appearances in the Canadian TV dramas La Femme Nikita (1992) and At The Hotel (2006). And at the time of his death he was starring in HBO Canada's hit comedy series Less Than Kind.

His appearance, with a fleshy, expressive face and soft body, allowed him to suggest pathos, but he was able to play it with a fierce, often ironic, comic intelligence that made him a natural for more shadowy roles, where a cloak of affability hides dangerous aggression or fatal weakness.

Chaykin was born in Brooklyn, where his American father taught accounting at Baruch College, and his Canadian mother was a nurse. He moved to Toronto in 1974, after studying theatre at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and trying unsuccessfully to make it on Broadway. He worked in theatre in Toronto, and had a part in the 1975 film Me, and in 1978 appeared in King of Kensington, then Canada's favourite telelvision comedy. He had a good part in Riel (1979), a TV movie about the Metis rebel Louis Riel, among an international cast of Canadian-born actors, including Christopher Plummer, William Shatner, Arthur Hill, and Leslie Nielsen.

As that cast list suggests, the cross-border divide is hardly pronounced, though its flow is usually in the opposite direction to Chaykin's. But in the 1980s Toronto became a production centre for American film and television, and Chaykin's ability to imbue a short appearance with real impact kept him busy, with small roles in films like War Games (1983). He played Lt Copernik opposite Powers Boothe's Philip Marlowe in an adaptation of Red Wind for the American series, and made two appearances in the cop show Night Heat (1986), the first Canadian-produced drama sold to an American network.

After Dances With Wolves, Chaykin had notable parts in My Cousin Vinny (1992) where he instructs Danny De Vito about Grits and smaller films like Ed Zwick's much-underrated Leaving Normal and Diane Keaton's Unstrung Heroes (both 1995); he had played with Keaton in Mrs Soffel. Independent films know no borders; Chaykin had bigger roles in two films by the British director Richard Kwientniowski, as a diner-owner in Love And Death On Long Island (1996), and one of his best parts as Philip Seymour Hoffman's bookie in Owning Mahowny (2003). In 2006, Chaykin won the 'Career So Far' award from the Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film; Hoffman had received the same award the previous year.

In 2000 he played Wolfe in Golden Spiders, a television movie which led to the series; he later sent up the character as Nerus in the sf series Stargate SG-1. He also played a recurring role in the series Entourage, for America's HBO, as overbearing film producer Harvey Weingard, which led him to quip 'I have never worked for Harvey Weinstein (on whom the character was based) and now I think maybe I never will'.

Chaykin died following a heart valve infection; he had suffered numerous recent health problems. He is survived by his third wife, Canadian actress Susannah Hoffman, who also had a role in Nero Wolfe, and their daughter Rose. Two previous marriages ended in divorce. He will be seen in a cameo role in the Canadian film Barney's Vision, based on Mordecai Richler's novel; in Canadian director Sidney Furie's Conduct Unbecoming, and as Kevin Spacey's mentor in Bagman, George Hickenlooper's film in which Spacey plays the lobbyist Jack Abramhoff.