Major League Baseball returned this week, and that means it’s the time of year when I revisit one of my all-time favorite films: “Moneyball.” It chronicles the 2002 Oakland A’s, who, despite having the lowest payroll in the league, find success by using new statistical techniques to scout and sign players. It’s a film I’ve seen so many times on cable that, when I pop in my DVD copy, I know when the commercial breaks are supposed to happen.
Every couple of years, after I’m done with my rewatch, I reread the book that the film is adapted from, Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” It is one of my favorite books, and it always gets me thinking about an age-old debate: “Can the movie ever be better than the book?”
Despite being a part of the film community, I do typically find myself on the pro-book side of the debate. A lot of movie adaptations of novels end up being simplified versions of the works they are based on, losing much of the depth that can only be explored on the page.
The example I always jump to is Zack Snyder’s (“Justice League”) 2009 adaptation of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen.” At first glance, the graphic novel’s visual presentation might seem conducive to a great film adaptation. However, Snyder, like many directors adapting novels to the big screen, struggles with unlocking the deeper themes of the text. These filmmakers are much more interested in recreating the novel’s plot visually than telling the actual story.
Taking this approach is much harder to do for a book like “Moneyball.” There are automatically some differences between a work of fiction like “Watchmen” and a work of nonfiction like “Moneyball.” However, the narrative structures and storytelling techniques remain the same, to the point that you could make completely new identities for the real-life people and the story would remain virtually the same.
In the case of “Moneyball,” the plot of the book does not really translate well to film — a bunch of guys sitting around talking about baseball players doesn’t make for a visually interesting film if you were to shoot only what is written on the page. It is structured in a non-linear fashion: not a singular story, but a series of vignettes. There is a main character in Billy Beane, the A’s General Manager — portrayed by Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”) in the film adaptation — but he isn’t a central part of the book’s journey.
By taking the page-to-screen approach that many film adaptations do, “Moneyball” could have risked becoming a jumbled, unfocused mess that focused way too much on a non-existent plot and not enough on what the book is really about — beating the odds by adapting, innovating and defying tradition.
As a result, screenwriters Steven Zaillian (“The Irishman”), Aaron Sorkin (“Trial of the Chicago 7”) and Stan Chervin (“Space Warriors”) were forced to approach the story in a completely different way. They make the smart choice of focusing on Billy Beane as the main character and doing what all great sports movies do: use sports as a backdrop to explore broader themes.
Sure, the film has great moments centered on baseball — like the record-clinching Scott Hatteberg home run — but those scenes are used as climactic junctures in Beane’s story. It covers a lot of the themes of the “Moneyball” book, but, on the whole, the film is quite different from its source material. And this works to the film’s advantage. By being so different, the film allows itself to be judged by its own merits; it no longer has to deal with the debate of “was it better than the book?” — it can just be a great film.
When comparing “Moneyball” to other book-to-film adaptations, it’s also particularly useful to compare it to other adaptations by author Michael Lewis. The two other big Lewis adaptations have been “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,” which has many similarities to “Moneyball,” and “The Blind Side,” which is a more straightforward adaptation than the other two.
Like the book “Moneyball,” “The Big Short” uses a vignette format to follow many different characters in the lead-up to the housing market crash that caused the Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks in 2007-08. Similar to the “Moneyball” screenwriters, Charles Randolph (“Bombshell”) and Adam McKay (“Vice”) decided to take the film adaptation of “The Big Short” in a different direction from the book. Where they differ, however, is the direction they decided to take. Randolph and McKay decided to use the plot, rather than the themes, of the book to convey their point.
Now, I admire “The Big Short” for trying to make the adaptation an entertaining docu-drama to educate people on this very important event (re: the Great Recession) in modern American history. But I don’t think it works nearly as well as “Moneyball” at telling the story that Lewis originally intended. Ironically, part of that is because “The Big Short” sticks a bit too close to the source material.
The book is able to juggle all of its storylines because it has the time and space to properly explore them; the film does not have that luxury. Not only does it have to deal with constant tonal shifts, but properly dissecting the plots of four different storylines while also giving themes their necessary depth and explaining a lot of complicated financial jargon is incredibly difficult to do in just two hours.
This is why the film adaptation of “Moneyball” was smart to center solely on Billy Beane. We don’t get all of the fun short stories from the book, but we do get the main ideas and themes of the novel. And, by not giving the audience everything, the film encourages them to go read the book for something extra. It may not reach the artistry of “The Godfather,” “Jaws” or “Goodfellas,” but “Moneyball” does share one thing with all of those films: It is a great adaptation.
Daily Arts Writer Mitchel Green can be reached at mitchgr@umich.edu.