The Money & the Cross

Moneyball is a movie based on the events surrounding the Oakland A’s 2002 baseball season. The Mill & the Cross is a movie based on Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 painting The Way to Calvary. Baseball is practically a religion, so it makes sense that it’s obsessed with judgement and miracles. Christianity has a few hang-ups surrounding the judgement thing too, hence the thousands of paintings depicting the subject. Both films attempt to take a singular turning point in their respective mythologies and explain just what made those moments so important.

Both movies take a moment of eucatastrophe (the A’s 2001 season, the Crucifixion) and spin out some of the themes clinging to each moment: judgement, the wrath of God/fans, the definition of the Select (either as one of the Saved or as one of those with a pro contract). In both, crowds alternately cheer and jeer those on the field below them (Oakland Coliseum or Golgotha, doesn’t matter). Players, of course, only get booed when they lose. But when Jesus gets arrested, the same folks who watched him preach now watch the execution with glee.

Moneyball is the more accessible film, by far. It benefits from a Sorkinized script and snappy pacing, not to mention great performances by virtually everyone in it. The story simply explores whether General Manager Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) strange new hiring methods (aka Sabermetrics), formulated by his new assistant Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), will work for the A’s season. The tension of the film is helped by the fact that the conclusion isn’t that well known -- other than by baseball nuts, I assume. Moneyball covers the paradigm shift of baseball management as it moved from the model of highly subjective, personality-based recruiting system of the old boys to a new, digitized, dispassionate numbers game in which personal judgment has no place: basically, the death of god in baseball. According to sabermetrics, there is no one left to appeal to. Your number is all you are. In Moneyball, the GM is the god now. Like the Claw, he decides who stays and who goes. The irony of his role is heightened by the fact that Billy Beane himself was a product of the old system. A baseball scout declared the high-school aged Beane to be a superstar in the making, leading to his fateful decision to go pro instead of heading to college. The older Beane’s interaction with Ivy League grad Peter is colored by their different life choices, and it leads to some of the best moments in the movie.

The Mill & the Cross, however, goes more traditional, covering the death of God, full stop. Well, let me back up.The Mill & the Cross doesn’t actually depict the events leading up to the Crucifixion. It depicts a depiction of the events leading up to the Crucifixion, namely, the work of Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel. This meta-depiction makes The Mill & the Cross more complicated as a film. It also makes it more confusing, since it’s not always clear what the movie is trying to show us. Bruegel’s painting put some real innovations into the standard account. In his painting, the Miller is the new metaphor for God: it is he, with his clutch position in the village, who sifts and winnows and grinds grain into the staff of life. If he decides not to work with you, you’re pretty much screwed. For an agricultural society just beginning to realize the fruits of the Renaissance, Miller=God made plenty of sense.

Of course, when it comes to the Crucifixion, we all know how this story ends. We know all the little details. Therefore, there is no real tension for the viewer. But narrative tension is not what director Lech Majewski was aiming for. His goal was to create a 3-D version of Bruegel’s painting, and that’s exactly what happens. The scenery, the colors, the costumes, the appearance of the 500 people in it -- it’s all pulled directly from the painting, to frequently stunning effect. When the film moves, the emphasis is on what Bruegel must have seen as an artist: the daily life of Flanders and the mundane rituals of his fellow citizens that inspired his version of the Biblical account. But in the film, Bruegel is also a character (played by a tired-looking Rutger Hauer) -- and he has the power to “stop time,” freezing frames to halt the story and explain important concepts of his painting. The result is visually impressive but emotionally hollow.

The biggest quirk of The Mill & the Cross, and the biggest cause of confusion, is that while it details something taking place in the early ADs, it is "set" in 16th century Flanders. As we, the audience, watch Bruegel visualize his painting, it’s unclear whether he’s imagining the whole thing, whether he’s using his neighbors as Biblical-stand-ins, or if the events of Flanders in 1564 are paralleling the Biblical story, making the painting a political/cultural metaphor as well as a devotional piece. Majewski toys with all these scenarios. Events that seem mostly real (i.e. they have no obvious Biblical analogue) occur in the film’s first half: a man is killed by Spanish mercenaries for no apparent reason (it’s later implied, but not stated, that he could be heretic, but his selection is random as far as the viewer is concerned). Later, a young man hovers around a busty, pretty girl who resolutely ignores him. Then he leaves. Is she a virgin, slut, or prostitute? We don’t know. Was there a significance to their non-encounter? We don’t know. Does that little vignette appear in Bruegel’s painting? We don’t know. Soon after, a passel of children scream and run around a house, in a scene almost too long to endure. What’s the point of that scene, if not merely to garner some audience sympathy for the woman looking after them? Again, that part is left unexplained, largely because the most of the film has no spoken script.

Unlike The Mill & the Cross, Moneyball is rich in explanations. Aaron Sorkin loves dialogue, and the two main characters, GM Beane and Peter Brand, exchange rapid fire facts and theories surrounding the all-important baseball stats of their players. While much of their conversation is outwardly esoteric -- as a non-baseball person, I didn’t know 90% of what they were obsessing about -- but my ignorance didn’t matter, because the underlying messages were so clear. The numbers for one guy aren’t working! We need to switch cogs to get this machine going again! Trade him for this guy! But we have to make the owner think it’s for a different reason! It was obvious what was going on, what needed to be done.

While Sorkin’s screenplay is tight and snappy -- just like all his others -- Majewski’s screenplay is fitful, halting, irresolute, almost senile. There are only three speaking characters: Bruegel himself, his patron, and a woman who is or who represents Mary (yes, that Mary, the Theotokos). They all recite their lines while facing the audience, but without breaking the fourth wall. They sit dead center of the frame, as if the director was fearful that the speeches might be mistaken for dialogue. No worries, mate. We know you’re not out to elucidate anything.

In fact, long stretches of the film are without any lines at all. I assume that’s partly for practical reasons (most of the actors are Polish, but the three speaking actors use English), but also because Majewski felt that the story was self-evident...being, you know, from the most popular book to come out in the last 2000 years. But the film is really only partly about the Way to Calvary -- the other part is about life in the 16th century, and most people do need a bit of clarification on the current events of that period; for example, maybe highlight why the Spanish mercenaries are riding through Flanders like they own the place, or give us a heads-up on who the current king is, and what the religious situation is like (because it seems like it might be relevant, but Americans don’t know history!). The “minimal dialogue” model works some movies, say Valhalla Rising, in which the protagonist didn’t speak for the excellent reason that he was fucking mute, and in which the other characters spoke to each other, as people interacting with each other tend to do.

The main problem I had with The Mill & the Cross is that it was a little too interested in its source, the painting of The Way to Calvary. The result works as an art history exercise, but fails as a film. Consider Mel Gibson’s horrible Jesusploitation movie from whenever ago. For all its faults, it emphasized the human element, the inevitable tide everyone was swept up in. People screamed and cried and rent their clothes. It was nasty, but at least the actors threw themselves into it. In Majewski’s version, the actors generally just stand around looking incredibly uncomfortable, because they aren’t being used as actors, they’re being used as a clothesrack/prop hybrids.

So there you have it. Whether you're looking for a zippy tale of a team chasing the World Series, or an art history lesson come to life, there's something out there for you. If you're looking for a movie where God trades Jesus to the Devil Rays because his RBI's just weren't up to snuff…well, tell me when you find it, because I'd totally watch that one.