TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Sport and cinema

Moneyball

Moneyball

Bennett Miller
2011 - United States - 2h13

Screenings : thursday 25 - 8:30 pm - Grand Théâtre - presented by Louis Mathieu - film teacher

The true story of Billy Beane, a promising former baseball player who having failed to succeed on the pitch decides to try his luck in managing a team in a way no one has ever done before...

“The main achievement of Moneyball, is that it is simultaneously a classic Hollywood story, a heroic sports film where tenacity and intelligence pave the way to victory, and its absolute negation: a dry film (...) (like the rules of baseball, say the uninitiated, but do you need to know html programming to like The Social Network?); an anti-spectacular film in which the outlandish, technical and sometimes wild spoken word (for instance, the extraordinary scenes of trading players), takes precedence over the sport itself, which makes do with a few radio voice-overs, minimalist clips and zoomed-in television inserts à la Blow Up; a film with an indecisive moral tone, which spends its time asserting one thing and then its opposite, and through to the end it constantly bounces between the varied the points of view of its characters (Brad Pitt, with his silky ambivalence, and the brilliantly silent Jonah Hill). Geniuses and losers are made of the same wood, we are told, and it is a wood that floats as best it can on a river with a fast, opaque and icy current. This is baseball, but it could just as easily be politics or finance: the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. This rare vertiginous vision is due above all to Bennett Miller who, following on from Capote, has confirmed his intelligence as a director and his ability to film the spoken word as pure action.” (Jacky Goldberg; Les Inrocks)

CAST AND CREW

Cast : Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt
Screenplay : Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin
Cinematography : Wally Pfister
Editing : Christopher Tellefsen
Music : Mychael Danna

Production : Columbia Pictures

French distributor : Park Circus