Film review: Moneyball

Director: Bennett Miller

Director: Bennett Miller

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt

Based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball is unlikely source material for a dramatically compelling film about America's national pastime.

In 2002, Billy Beane (Pitt) manager of the Oakland A's, embarked on a revolutionary programme to overcome his team's inability to compete on the financial level with bigger teams by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his team. The book, full of dense detail about baseball statistics and economic analysis - and baseball for anyone who has ever watched it is, like many American sports, complex, stupefying and thorough in its analysis of performance, down to the smallest details - has in the hands of various scriptwriters, including The Social Network and West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin, been turned into a story about one man's determination to overturn tradition at a moment at which his team and their sport are faced with no choice but to adapt or die.

In collaboration with a young Yale-educated economist named Peter Brand (Hill), Beane fights his scouts, his crotchety coach (Hoffman) and the players themselves in his determination to bring baseball into the modern age and show that stats are more than numbers recording performance, they can also be used to determine performance (Beane's strategies were employed by the Boston Red Sox to break their infamous World Series curse in 2004).

In the same way that he brought dramatic tension to bear on the story of Facebook and move away from the detail of the computer programming in The Social Network, Sorkin's script creates a dramatically satisfying tale that places Beane and his personal history and struggles at the centre of the bigger story about sport and its particular challenges.

Pitt gives one of his strongest performances in years as the insular, tortured general manager who steadfastly believes that, in the long term, his faith in this new idea will pay off. He's ably supported by Hill, who shows that he's not just the dirty fat kid, but also has acting chops, and Hoffman as the curmudgeonly coach Art Howe who represents the opposition of the establishment to Beane and Brand's new brand of management.

Beautifully shot by Wall Pfister and easy to follow on the purely dramatic level without knowledge of the sport or the details of its statistics, Moneyball stands out as one of the best sports films in years and easily belongs in the top of the sub group of great baseball films along with films like Eight Men Out, The Natural and Bull Durham.