Moneyball

When I heard that Moneyball was in production, I thought it would fail.  How do you take a book about statistical analysis and turn it into a narrative film?

Moneyball succeeds by changing focus from the book.  The book, as I said, is about statistical analysis and uses one team’s experiment with it to educate the reader.  The movie is about Billy Beane, the manager of said team, his journey, and how his grasp of the potential of statistical analysis changed his sport, his team, and his life.

Brad Pitt plays Beane as smart and savvy, yet insecure.  He’s a baseball guy, but he’s so totally a product of his lifelong immersion in the sport that he’s a baseball guy only.  When he spots an influential whiz kid (Jonah Hill) in an opposing manager’s office, he understands the value of a completely different perspective.  It’s a perspective so different that betting on it could cost him his career.  There’s your drama.  There’s your movie. 

Now, I like baseball.  I go to several games per year, I follow the Nationals in the Post, and believe that Marconi invented radio specifically to give the world the magic that is Vin Scully.  But you don’t have to like baseball to like this movie.  You have to like scrappy underdogs, you have to like things that don’t go boom, and you have to like Brad Pitt.  I like all three, and I like this picture.  I want to see it again as soon as I can.  

The Social Network

The Social Network is a movie about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome.  As with many “aspies,” he’s a genius.  Also, as with all aspies, he’s a social incompetent (I’m not casting aspersions.  While genius is a possible side effect of Asperger’s Syndrome, social incompetence is a core symptom.).  He’s smart enough to know that relationships matter and driven enough to pantomime what he perceives to be appropriate behaviors, but he can’t quite get it.  This makes him feel powerless, envious, and angry – why can’t he intuitively do this social interaction stuff that the idiots around him handle so effortlessly?

The guy’s name is Mark Zuckerberg, and he invents Facebook.  Marrying his outsider’s near-clinical observations of how people interact with his genius for computer programming, he figures out how to take the social experience of college and put it on line.  If he can put his thumb in the eyes of those he envies, so much the better.*

But he’s an aspie.  He can’t intuit whether or not someone’s a fraud.  He can’t intuit who his real friends are.  He can’t intuit how to run a relationship, much less a business, because people and their natural social organizations don’t work with the clear, understandable, and unerring precision of computer code.  He can only learn the way you might learn how to do something for which you have no talent: by flailing around until he gets it right.  When he flails around, people get hurt.  When people get hurt and realize he’s now a very wealthy man, they sue.

That’s the core of the movie, and it’s the core of the tragedy of the character of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.  To get us there, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin captures the rhythm of Asperger’s conversation and the calculating, intellectualized nature of Asperger’s interaction.  Jesse Eisenberg, playing Zuckerberg under David Fincher’s direction, redefines his career with this performance.  Together, they capture the singlemindedness of Asperger’s; the sublimated rage of disability; and the helplessness of a young man who’s too smart to realize that, in some ways, he isn’t smart at all.

The Social Network itself seems a bit cold, a bit clinical.  It thinks too much and feels not nearly enough.  But that’s the point, isn’t it?  The Social Network is unblinking in its perception and devastating in its conclusions.  I can’t wait to discuss it with my friends.

*There’s a catch, and you need to know this.  I have it on very good authority that the book upon which this film is based is poorly researched claptrap.  The character of “Mark Zuckerberg,” as depicted in the film, may not reflect the actual guy.

Charlie Wilson's War

Cinescene's Les Phillips hit the nail on the head with his review of CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR. Well, except for his impression of Julia Roberts's performance. I thought she was fine. With his permission, here's Les's review:

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (2007, directed by Mike Nichols). This is slight, but expert, and very entertaining. A playboy Texas congressman suddenly gets serious about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and works to channel a billion dollars into military aid to the mujaheedin. Nichols and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin scrupulously avoid political content here; CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR is a fluffy slice of American political life in the eighties. Wilson's staff is all-female -- one of them is nicknamed "Jailbait" -- he parties with lobbyists in Vegas. He tells a newspaper that he's never been to rehab because "they don't serve liquor there." Nichols makes high comedy out of Wilson's lovable roguishness. There's one French-farce sequence set in Wilson's office, with entrances and exits and fast dialogue, that approaches comic genius.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR is rich in excellent small performances, and it also has Philip Seymour Hoffman as the crude, irascible, hardass CIA man who tutors Wilson in the works and ways of covert geopolitics. He's excellent, but the part isn't a challenge; Jack Black could have done it nearly as well. Tom Hanks captures Wilson's easy charm and humanity, but he doesn't signify Texas. Julia Roberts plays a savvy, steel magnolia millionairess and political operator. It's a terrific role, and Roberts isn't up to it. She doesn't have the self-possessed energy that the character needs, and she doesn't sound like she's ever been anywhere near Houston.

A bit of a one-off, but Nichols hasn't lost his touch.