The Moneyball Axis of Corporate Biopics

I watched Blackberry earlier this week. It’s pretty good! I’d also recently seen The Beanie Bubble, which was fine! So was Air!

This got me thinking about corporate biopics, a topic which has already been explored in depth by people who are better at this than me. What I’m proposing is not an in-depth exhumation of the cultural import of these movies (though like many others I do find it supremely weird that so many of them came out in 2023, and worry both about an impending tidal wave of this kind of movie, and that stories of brands becoming more brand than any other brand there ever was will outpace even the nominally pro-humanist superhero dreck). I instead have devised what the internet craves most—a bullshit classification system I cooked up in an evening and will heretofore preach as gospel.

Here’s the deal: I think that these movies all aim to basically land at or around Moneyball. These are movies that aim for very good, but almost never manage to exceed that.

Actually, let me show you.

The Moneyball Axis

Okay! Introducing The Moneyball Axis. To walk you through this in a bit more detail, let’s break it down going left to right.

Tier 1

Over here, furthest on the left, is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the best film of all time as declared by the 2022 Sight & Sound poll. It is a nearly three and a half hour long portrait of the quotidian woes of a widowed housewife in the 1970s. I’m sure it’s very good, but for our purposes, it’s only illustrative as a category of film that is least like the one we’re trying to examine. This shit is zero percent Moneyball.

Tier 2

Here, we’ve started treading into corporate biopic territory, but these movies have yet to meet or exceed “broadly good” as a quality baseline. There are moments, to be sure—Sarah Snook manages to give a genuinely textured performance in The Beanie Bubble, and I’d argue that Taron Egerton’s aw-shucks go-for-broke energy is ninety percent of why Tetris works—but these are movies that are paradoxically too bland and too stylized. It feels telling that these are both Apple TV+ releases, because they are prima facie safe bets. In that respect, the over-stylized underbaked quality most resembles commercials themselves, but the kind you’d get from David Fincher or Michael Bay in the 80s—there are some interesting ideas in there, some sense of ownership and investment behind the camera, but at the end of the day, they just want you buying the plushie, or the game, or the snack. This is also where Flamin’ Hot (the movie about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos) would probably go, but I still respect myself enough not to watch that.

Tier 3

Tier 3 is where we start cooking with gas. These movies are definitionally good, but they are not revolutionary works of cinema. This is the realm previously occupied by the heavily-endangered genre of the adult drama, the kind where they slap an R rating on for language and smoking. At Tier 3 on The Moneyball Axis, you will receive movies that run at or around two hours, and they will probably involve some kind of mid-20th century sporting brouhaha. They will star Matt Damon, and he will portray a guy who is very good at his job leading a team of other guys who are very good at their jobs. Many of the other guys will be portrayed by That Guys who you will spend the entire movie trying to place. Obstacles will be overcome, scenes will be judiciously blocked and shot, the editing will be crisp, the needle drops will be obvious bordering on offensive, and there will be speeches about the innate meaningfulness about what these characters are doing. Your dad will love it, and will google “[Title of movie] what really happened” while walking out of the theatre, assuming he doesn’t already know. You will see it on an airplane five years after its release and be floored at how great something like this is when you’re stuck at cruising altitude and have only eaten a Delta-branded Biscoff cookie and some ginger ale in the last four hours.

Tier 4

The next tier is when, as Harry Styles would say, the movie begins to feel like a movie. Films of this ilk are more likely than not to be directed by someone with major film-industry clout and a sturdy eight-figure budget behind them (Michael Mann with Ferrari, or Danny Boyle with Steve Jobs) and they tend to take on the contours of a Great Man-esque portrait of a supremely talented genius and/or craftsman and/or artist who eventually ascends to cultural godhood by dint of their efforts, their talent, their products, or all three.

Where these movies tend to falter is their dedication to that singular, founding vision, and a reluctance on the part of the filmmaker to truly mine the depths of the character’s deceptions or negative influence on the world around them. The reality distortion field only goes so far. Indeed, to the extent that any of these projects are willing to critique a corporation, they usually come in the form of some accursed Wondry-podcast-adaptation made for streaming (think “WeCrashed” or “The Dropout” or “Super Pumped”). But, invariably, these projects are slavishly devoted to escalating the corrupt and corrupting figureheads of these diseased companies as some kind of Manson-esque object of fascination and obsession. The fault, in these shows’ estimation, lies not in the (often) criminal founders of companies based on lies and deceptions, but with the audience. How could we ever be so naïve as to believe in Elizabeth Holmes, or Adam Neumann, or Travis Kalanick?

BlackBerry, therefore, is in the unique position of being both a very well-constructed movie—director Matt Johnson got every goddamn cent of this film’s $5 million budget on screen, mostly by hiring really really good actors and giving them a meaty, character-focused script to work with—and a movie innately about failure, not just of product or society, but of the people who were supposed to see this coming. BlackBerry by its very nature offers up its cast as sacrificial lambs on the alter of progress. These were people who ruled the world. They knew everything. And then they lost.

Tier 5

At last we arrive at the apex. Beyond the inherent romanticism of baseball movies, or the extremely punchy Steve Zaillian/Aaron Sorkin script, or the almost absurdly propulsive kineticism to the way Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane lumbers around the Oakland Athletics building and changes destinies as he meanders from room to room, or the mere presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman, it helps that, as with the principal characters of BlackBerry, this is a story about a group of failures, and it is better for it. So much about this movie works by sheer brute force—pair enough great actors with a set of great writers and a good director (where is Bennett Miller these days?) and it’s hard for your final product to be truly bad—but the soul of this movie is its futility. Beane was a major-league player, but never a good one, and then he bombed out. Paul DePodesta, the real figure who served as the basis for Billy’s wise-beyond-his-years assistant Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), puttered around some of the most well-endowed MLB front offices before decamping to the Cleveland Browns and making the insane Deshaun Watson trade. These Athletics were good, for a time, and then they weren’t anymore. At some point after I write this, the Oakland A’s won’t even be in Oakland anymore. It will all be gone someday, and how lucky we were for the brief flash of light while it was here.

But wait, what’s that movie lurking off to the right, entirely off of The Moneyball Axis, and therefore implying that it is the highest caliber and most impactful version of the corporate biopic, both the true progenitor of the genre and its heretofore undisputed and unsurpassable champion?

Tier 6

It’s The Social Network. Duh.

More TK

-Luis