The Toronto International Film Festival's sacred mission — and one that has earned it preeminence among North American movie bashes — is to present the coolest stars in the smartest pictures. Last night it managed a tandem of celebrity éclat with a double feature of hot items at the Roy Thomson Hall: Brad Pitt in Moneyball for the early performance, George Clooney starring in and directing The Ides of March for the late show. Outside, fans screamed at the back-to-back appearance of the two dreamboats, as if it were a reunion of the Beatles (including the two dead ones). This vision was almost as historic: the twin icons of a popular caper-film series gracing the Roy Thomson for a kind of Ocean's Ontario.
Moneyball, no less than The Ides of March, is a solid, bustling social comedy at the 130-IQ level. If it finds a substantial audience, and some favor in the Motion Picture Academy, credit will go to Pitt, who not only stars as Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beans, but also produced the film. In hammering out an adaptation of Michael Lewis's "nonfiction" best-seller about Beane's 2002 season with the A's, Pitt ran through at least three writers — Stan Chervin (story) plus Oscar-winning scribes Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin — and three directors: David Frankel of The Devil Wears Prada and Marley & Me, then Ocean's helmer Steven Soderbergh, and finally Capote's Bennett Miller. Yet the movie doesn't play like the minutes of a fractious board meeting. It's bright and mostly fast. For invigorating stretches it boasts the zinging, stinging repartee of grown men working at a kids' game and tired of being handed the prevailing line of bull.
Most impatient is Beane, a former teen phenom who was all high-school promise, no big-league delivery. As the A's GM, he has manufactured playoff teams on a fraction of the payroll of the Yankees colossus. But in 2002 he had lost three top players to richer teams and would get no help from his chintz owner. "The problem," he tells his scouting staff, "is that there are the rich teams and the poor teams, and then there's 50 feet of crap, and then there's us." Beane has little talent to use as trade bait and few minor-league prospects. He can't win the old way. So he'll try another method: what Lewis called "moneyball."
In a confab with the Cleveland Indians, Beane notices a young stats cruncher named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, in an owlish, watchful turn). An economics major from Yale with no sports background, Brand is ready to put the sabermetric logarithms of baseball theoretician Bill James into practice, and Beane hires him. James' model is anathema to the A's scouts, parchment-skinned geezers who consider themselves the Supreme Court of baseball wisdom, muttering mantras like "five tools" and "good face" as if they were the Bill of Rights. Beane curt warning to them: "Adapt, or die." He also orders his field manager, Art Howe (a wearily agitated Philip Seymour Hoffman), to man first base with a kid who draws plenty of walks but has never played the position.
Apparently fearful of an all-talking picture, Miller adds shots of Billy driving at night, smashing things and working out in the team gym. And, presumably, for the ladies, there's a subplot of Beane's ex-wife (Robin Wright) and sweet, early-teens daughter (Kerris Dorsey) that has its sweet spots but whose main function is to pad a 90-min. movie with a half-hour of domestic angst and uplift. The central pairing, though, is pretty fabulous: Beane, a jock with a restless intelligence, going on a bold adventure with Brand, a sedentary soul whose computer brain pinwheels stats that Beane can turn into wins. It's as if the Winklevoss twins of The Social Network — another script with the high-octane motormouth Sorkin touch — had found a way to work with Mark Zuckerberg. When these two start brainstorming, Moneyball cruises into the high gear of the savviest old Hollywood comedies.
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