You may wonder why a blog called “Book Club Junkie” continues to talk about movies with very few recent book entries. You may rightly surmise that I haven’t been reading all that much lately. True, very true. Apparently I think this will be changing, because I optimistically checked out about 6 books from the library today. We’ll see. Anyway.
At this week’s Friday Noon Movie Club. I was joined by two friends who had never met each other, and we played what some people call Six Degrees of Separation, others Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and still others Dutch bingo. I call it the Six Degrees of Amy, because I met both of them through my friend Amy. And they each have a popcorn bucket, so I was well supplied. Thanks, ladies!
The movie of the day was Moneyball, and it was great. In theory it is a movie about baseball and the business of building a professional team. Which I, of course, know nothing about. It is also a movie about how a man measures himself, his life, and success.
Brad Pitt is amazing as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s. I read somewhere that he is building a career on movies in which you forget that he is Brad Pitt, a difficult thing for big stars to do. I’d have to say that’s true. Though I know zilch about the real Billy Beane, it seemed to me that Pitt was able to develop a whole physical personality for the character. This year Pitt also starred in The Tree of Life, a much darker role as an abusive father who comes to the knowledge of what he’s been. He was excellent in that as well.
About 10 years ago, Billy Beane began to change the way baseball teams operate by looking at team and player outcomes mathematically rather than by intuition. This did not make his team’s scouting group happy, and it didn’t make him popular with Oakland that year. In the movie, his character struggles with his failures—the scholarship to Stanford that he passed on to play major league baseball only to falter in the sport, a broken marriage that leaves him a part-time parent to his daughter, and managing one of the small-revenue teams in the American League.
Beane knows that the baseball world measures his success only by whether his team wins the last game of the season, and he hasn’t pulled that off. As he seeks change, he reevaluates his relationship to the team and to the game. And he reevaluates how he measures his own success.
Pitt was great, but I also really enjoyed Jonah Hill as the statistics-savvy assistant that Beane hires. Philip Seymour Hoffman was a surprise as the shaved-headed coach of the A’s—I barely recognized him. But he is not used to his full potential here, unfortunately. I would have liked to see more depth to his character.
The last few weeks I’ve sat through quite a few male-oriented movies, including Margin Call and The Ides of March. They all had a strong set of actors turning in great performances, but of these three titles, Moneyball is the movie that I could take something away from, the one I would most readily recommend to others.
About four hours later after I walked out of Moneyball, my church movie group met for a showing of The Descendants. George Clooney is at his best as Hawaiian Matthew King, a husband and father who is forced to face up to a family that has hit rock bottom. He is surrounded by strong performances, particularly Shailene Woodley, who plays his teenage daughter. I cannot imagine family members speaking the way that the daughters in this movie speak to their father and to each other, but beyond that, the complex nature of every family relationship rings true. The whole movie is told from the perspective of King, whose wife is in a coma. Everything King believed about his family has been thrown into question, and he has to work through each piece of information that others hand him. Like King, we are limited to the same information. We get no back story, no flashback scenes with his wife fully alive and well.
There is an interesting tangent to the story. King is the sole trustee of Hawaiian property holdings that have been handed down through generations of his ancestors. The majority of his numerous cousins are pressuring him to sell to one of the interested buyers, as they all stand to profit hugely from the sale of the virgin land. One particularly effective scene shows the family overlooking the oceanfront property, reminiscing about years of camping there. The youngest daughter, 10 years old, looks at them and says “What about me?” That is the basic question of the movie. Through all family and societal difficulties, what do we leave for the next generation?
Toward the end, the movie points to the need for forgiveness and grace in order to move on.
The Descendants is really good, but somehow lacks whatever it takes to be great. Still worth watching—and bring some tissue.
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