rating: ★★★★

Moneyball is a sports movie that’s as much about talk as it is about playing sports. It’s about the men who run the game of baseball off the field and how logic and statistics trump intuition and talent. It’s an underdog story, but not of the kind you’ve seen before.

Based on Michael Lewis’s 2003 non-fiction book, Moneyball tells the story of how Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) changed the game of baseball during the 2002 season. The film opens with footage of the A’s losing the 2001 American Division League Series to the New York Yankees, a team that has triple the A’s budget to field players. Being the lowest salaried team in the league, the A’s can’t afford to keep their best players at the end of the season. This leaves Beane a team with no stars and not enough money to fill their positions.

Enter Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), Yale economics graduate — based off real-life Paul DePodesta. During a trading session with the Cleveland Indians, Beane notices how chubby, non-descript Brand seems to be calling the trading shots and so he ends up hiring him.

It turns out that although Brand has never played baseball, he has spent countless hours pouring over player statistics and figuring out which players aren’t worth their salaries. Brand’s theory calls for disregarding the past hundred years’ worth of scouting know-how and instead hiring players based on one thing: their ability to get on base. Together, Beane and Brand put this unorthodox theory into practice with the hapless A’s and forever change the way baseball teams are managed.

Moneyball is a smart film. Written by Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), the dialogue crackles and the plot zips along. It’s a long movie, 133 minutes, and contains a fair amount of exposition, but you never feel that the film is merely lecturing you on the details of sports statistics or sabermetrics. One scene in which Beane negotiates a series of whirlwind trades, jumping from one phone to another to call one manager or another, is a hilarious, fast, virtuoso testament to both the writing and the acting. And the acting here is excellent, although deceptively so.

Brad Pitt is constantly undervalued as an actor. Perhaps some people feel like his movie star persona overshadows his performances, but he really is one of the best movie stars around. In his best performances in Fight Club, The Assassination of Jesse James and this year’s The Tree of Life, Pitt seems to completely shed the movie star image, allowing only his character to remain.

Since Billy Beane is practically a Hollywood hero in real life, the role needs a movie star to fill it. Pitt’s charm, confidence and hidden intelligence prove to be the perfect fit for the tenacious, cocky intelli-jock Beane.

The supporting cast also impresses. It’s not surprising that Philip Seymour Hoffman commands the small role of Art Howe, the A’s manager who’s always rubbing noses with Beane. However, it’s Jonah Hill’s performance as Peter Brand that is really surprising. Known for raunchy comedies, Hill doesn’t seem the natural fit for an understated performance. But he is. The role still calls for humour, albeit deadpan humour, but beyond that, it calls for being smart, controlled and holding the screen beside Pitt — which Hill does handily. This short, sloppy comedian may have a real future acting in dramas.

For his second feature, Bennett Miller (Capote) directs Moneyball with confidence. His style may lack flash, but the visuals are crisp and he has a knack for bringing out strong performances in his actors. Wally Pfister’s (Inception) cinematography beautifully frames the film. Some of the game sequences are visually stunning, something you wouldn’t expect from a baseball game.

Like the best baseball movies, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, Moneyball isn’t merely a series of sports montages leading up to a championship game but instead an examination of the whole culture of baseball in the United States.

Baseball is more than a game. It’s a state of mind and almost something of a religion. It’s also largely a business. Moneyball beautifully taps into the economic mindset of the game, showing how little influence individual players have on the success of their teams and that whether a team wins or loses all comes down to money.

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