Sports

Indeed, while I’d still argue that this fall’s crop of Oscar contenders looks a little tepid in cinematic terms, the array of potential star power and collective testosterone in the best-actor category surely has the Academy’s broadcast producers and promoters drooling. It seems plausible and even likely that Pitt, George Clooney (for “The Descendants”) and Ryan Gosling (conceivably for “Drive” but more likely for “The Ides of March”) will all be nominated, perhaps an unprecedented Leading Man-apalooza. If Pitt’s role in “Moneyball” is more of a conventional star turn than his career-shifting performance as the stern 1950s father in “The Tree of Life” (for which he emphatically deserves awards but won’t win any), it’s still terrific. He’s on-screen in almost every scene, often filling it up in extreme close-up, and captures the bluff, buff and shrewd Beane, a washed-up jock who embraced an unorthodox statistical philosophy through sheer necessity, with great wit and physicality. (Let me throw in that “Moneyball” is a delirious study of bad early-2000s guy fashions and haircuts, which may elude some of the audience but is definitely conscious.)

Let me hasten to assure you that “Moneyball” isn’t all that much of a baseball movie, although fans of the national pastime will of course rush to see it. It’s a prime Brad Pitt movie — arguably the prime Brad Pitt movie — and an American fable about a battered but lovable divorced dad who defies conventional wisdom and beats the odds. Then it’s a somewhat watered-down retelling of Lewis’ story about how math geeks upended an American institution, and only then is it a sports flick (and probably the most detailed portrait of life behind the scenes in Major League Baseball ever put on-screen). It’s time for me to confess that I’m in a highly unusual position re “Moneyball,” which cannot help but color my reaction. I’m a lifelong fan of Beane’s bedraggled, low-budget team, the A’s, and while I had to follow their remarkable 2002 season, which is chronicled here, from 3,000 miles away, it left an enduring impression. That also means that I view the events of “Moneyball” through a rueful prism, since Beane and the team have struggled through some lean years since the explosive drama of ’02. The rest of baseball has long since caught up to the A’s, who’ve had several losing seasons in a row (including this one), play in a decrepit stadium before a declining fan base, and may not survive in Oakland much longer.

None of that should affect how ordinary moviegoers react to “Moneyball” in the slightest. Here’s what you need to know, at least as it appears on the big screen: After losing a heartbreaking five-game playoff series to the big-budget New York Yankees in 2001, the A’s faced implosion. Three of their biggest stars were defecting to richer Eastern teams, and Beane’s skinflint team owner, Steve Schott (played by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, one of several odd cameos in the film), refuses to increase the team’s $39 million budget, about one-third what the Yankees spend. In the course of trying to hustle up some affordable warm bodies to play for his team, Beane runs into a supremely unathletic Yale economics grad named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, proving he can handle a modulated dramatic role), who is buried deep in the Cleveland Indians front office. Brand tells Beane that there’s an “epidemic failure” in baseball to understand the true nature of the game, and that he knows how to use “sabermetric” data to build a cheap team that will be even better than last year’s pricier version.

All of this is reasonably accurate, but if you’re a “Moneyball” reader who already knows what OBP and OPS stand for, you may feel slightly frustrated by the lack of detail, and you’ll realize that Peter Brand is a composite character largely based on Beane’s real-life assistant, Paul DePodesta (later the G.M. of the Los Angeles Dodgers and now a vice president of the New York Mets). In fairness, though, Miller does a nice job of dramatizing the opening shots in the ideological civil war that consumes baseball to this day. In meetings with Oakland’s scouting staff — leathery old guys who’ve spent their lives standing on sun-baked fields in the American outback, watching teenagers throw, catch and hit baseballs — Beane and Brand face a mixture of disbelief, contempt and outright rebellion.

Miller also makes it clear that the surprising success of the 2002 A’s was only partly a result of Brand/DePodesta’s innovative statistical research, which enshrined on-base percentage, slugging percentage and other newfangled stats as being far more relevant to winning than “baseball-card” numbers like batting average or RBIs. Beane had to batter his gruff, combative field manager, Art Howe (wonderfully played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), into compliance, and then saw Howe get much of the credit for the team’s record-setting winning streak. Some of the team’s discount-store pickups, like unorthodox relief pitcher Chad Bradford (Casey Bond) and Boston Red Sox castoff Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) paid off in spectacular fashion, but Beane also relied on old-school instincts at times, as when he traded away future star Carlos Peña (Adrian Bellani) and party-boy Jeremy Giambi (Nick Porrazzo), despite their unquestioned statistical value.

If you’re not a baseball fan, you probably don’t know how the story of the 2002 A’s developed on the field, or how it ended, so let’s finesse that point by saying that they shocked everybody else in the game — Beane’s roster of nobodies was widely mocked when the season began, and the team started very poorly — but the thrilling ride ended with mixed results. “Moneyball” will inevitably be compared to “The Social Network,” and they’re undeniably both long, leisurely, detail-rich stories of Information Age revolutions with long-lasting effects. But that isn’t really fair to either movie; “Moneyball” is meant as a classic tale of Podunk heroism, far closer in spirit to, say, “Hoosiers” than to the ambivalent, Gatsby-hued saga of “Social Network.” I also wouldn’t argue that “Moneyball,” enjoyable as it is, belongs in the same class. At 133 minutes, it’s a fair piece too long, and I mourn for the wonkier docudrama approach we might have seen in the aborted Steven Soderbergh version. But it’s an honorably crafted movie-star spectacle with a generous spirit and enormous popular appeal, and it happens to be about my team’s most extraordinary season. You can’t expect me to resist. 

Even by those standards, British filmmaker Asif Kapadia’s “Senna” is an unusually strong sports doc, one that should effortlessly leap across the gap between its core audience and the larger pop-culture universe. I promise: You don’t have to know or care anything about Formula One auto racing, or ever have heard of the legendary Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, to become fully drawn into this film’s universe. It’s pretty much accurate to describe Senna as the Pelé or Muhammad Ali of his sport, a personality who transcended his limited environment, and Senna’s story has a tragic, mythic dimension theirs do not. A rich kid from a poor country, Senna became a national hero and an international celebrity without ever losing his reserved, aristocratic demeanor. Even when Kapadia shows us footage of Senna as a lanky, handsome teenage go-kart racer, there’s something grave and haunted about his manner, and it’s nearly impossible to resist the fallacy that he could see the future, in which he would get all the victories and fame and girls he wanted and then die young.

I’m about to discuss the major elements of Senna’s biography, so if you want to see the movie without knowing the story, the place to hit the eject button would be right here. A pampered kid from a blue-blood São Paulo family, Ayrton Senna da Silva conceived an early desire to drive race cars and immediately displayed a remarkable gift for it. (As in many traditional Latin American families, he used his mother’s surname.) His parents supported him, and there was a widespread perception in later years that they had bought his way into Formula One, the glitzy, high-speed, gearhead pinnacle of the racing world. As Kapadia demonstrates in plenty of exciting race-day footage, from his first Formula One appearance Senna stood out for his reckless, fearless speed, and his ability to gain ground in bad weather that terrified other drivers. In his first-ever appearance at Formula One’s premier event, the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix, Senna nearly beat veteran French star Alain Prost despite driving an inferior car through heavy rain — and probably would have, had Prost not convinced officials to end the race early.

Prost and Senna became the Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier of 1980s auto racing, with the added twist that they were both rivals and, for several years, teammates with the McLaren racing franchise. Prost was a calculating technician who pursued championships with ruthless efficiency, while the taller Senna, with his aquiline good looks and reserved demeanor, was an aficionado of “pure racing.” (I remember Prost fans saying that Senna looked less like a real racing driver than like an actor playing one in a movie, and that’s about right.) They were friends, then bitter enemies and finally forged an uneasy peace toward the end — but except for Prost loyalists, there can’t be much doubt which of them was better. That 1984 victory at Monaco was the first of four for Prost, but Senna would win the race six out of seven times between 1987 and 1993. Prost won four Formula One championships to Senna’s three, but Prost had retired by the time Senna died, in a still-mysterious 135-mph crash at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. It’s almost certain the latter would have won several more had he lived.

Kapadia has an immense wealth of material to draw on in portraying the Prost-Senna rivalry, because even if most Americans had never heard of them the rest of the world had, and everything they did was observed by a phalanx of cameras. “Senna” features extensive backstage footage at numerous Formula One locations, including the tense pre-race meeting where drivers confront each other and authorities over regulations and safety conditions. We see home videos made by the Senna family and hear extensive voice-over interviews from many people who knew Senna well, including his sister Viviane, racing-team chiefs Ron Dennis and Frank Williams, racetrack physician Sid Watkins (a longtime friend who treated Senna on the track after his fatal injury at San Marino), and racing commentators John Bisignano and Reginaldo Leme.

There’s a lot of exciting intrigue in the story of Senna’s greatest racing seasons, including his suspicions that Formula One head Jean-Marie Balestre was not-so-subtly favoring his French countryman Prost, and the stranger-that-fiction fact that close battles for the championship between Prost and Senna were decided two years running by crashes at the Japanese Grand Prix. That’s without even going into the fateful, can’t-look-away drama of that dreadful weekend in Imola, Italy, in 1994, where Senna was driving a fast but unreliable Williams-Renault car with multiple mechanical difficulties. A day before the race, Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger was killed in practice, and another driver and several spectators were seriously injured. Sid Watkins remembers talking to Senna after Ratzenberger’s death and suggesting they both quit the auto-racing world and go fishing. Senna declined, and just hours before his death held a meeting with his fellow drivers where he volunteered to lead a group aimed at strengthening safety. (In fact, there have been no Formula One racing fatalities since then.)

“Senna” is such a vivid and powerful film about a larger-than-life personality that I hesitate to criticize it, but racing aficionados will notice a heavy and perhaps inevitable degree of hagiography. Kapadia never mentions, for instance, that Senna ultimately admitted causing his 1990 crash with Prost deliberately, both to eliminate the Frenchman from the championship and to retaliate against race authorities for perceived unfair treatment. Likewise, we never learn about Senna punching out Irish driver Eddie Irvine for “unlapping” himself, a violation of racing protocol, or about other incidents that gained the Brazilian a reputation as an unpredictable hothead. That’s really too bad, because that stuff would only have added to the complicated portrait of this populist hero from the nosebleed classes, who at some moments resembles an arrogant and entitled jet-setter but was also (according to those who knew him best) a humble and devout man who gave away millions to the poor. It isn’t necessary to call Senna a saint in order to recognize that he was both the greatest top-level racing driver of all time and an iconic, storybook character, even before his death elevated him (at least for Brazilians and racing fans) to the immortal sphere occupied by JFK or Marilyn or Elvis.

“Senna” is now playing at the Sunshine Cinema in New York and the Landmark in Los Angeles. It opens Aug. 19 in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington and Austin, Texas; and Aug. 26 in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Palm Springs, Calif., Phoenix, Portland, San Diego and Seattle, with more cities to follow.