In one of his finest performances, Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, a real-life failed baseball player for the New York Mets. In 2001 he's the 44-year-old general manager of the Oakland Athletics (known as the A's), an underfunded team in the San Francisco Bay Area. His best players are constantly being poached by wealthier clubs, earning the A's the reputation of being "organ donors to the rich". During a moment of insight and despair after losing three major stars, Billy is intrigued by a quietly spoken, overweight, bespectacled adviser working for the Cleveland Indians.
The man is 24-year-old Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an economist from Yale who's never played the game but keeps whispering obscure advice to the Cleveland pros. It transpires that he believes a winning team isn't necessarily made up of individual stars but of a combination of certain talents who together add up to runs. Such people are much cheaper to buy, probably easier to handle and certainly simpler to unload. Billy's immediately hooked on the idea that he might use Brand's complex formula to transform the A's into a truly winning combination rather than relying on luck, intuition and what JK Galbraith called "conventional wisdom". He hires Brand and sets about selling the idea to Oakland's old-fashioned scouts and coaches. The movie is a brilliant study of group dynamics. The chief scout goes, the chief coach (Philip Seymour Hoffman with shaven grey hair, pot belly and quizzical scowl) sticks it out but doesn't co-operate, and Billy doggedly pursues his new obsession, attracting ridicule and probably facing disaster and a one-way ticket to Palookaville. He wins in the end, though not in a triumphalist manner, and not permanently, but his life is changed.
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