Moneyball – review

This is a film that puts a funky kind of Gladwellian-Freakonomic spin on the underdog sports movie. It is intriguing despite being, for me, in an untranslated foreign language. Much of it is about the technical business of baseball, which is lost on me, and also, I suspect, on many British audiences. But it has this strange, beady-eyed sense of its own intelligent importance, created by co-screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin – heavy-hitters both. It is the true story of Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, manager of the Oakland A's, a failing and cash-poor baseball team. Beane employs nerdy-brainiac Yale economist Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to apply a statistical, almost actuarial technique of recruiting undervalued players cheaply, on the basis of their hitherto unnoticed records, which would, combined, create an enhanced probability of success. It turns out to be a glorious triumph: a kind of blackjack-card-counting for baseball. But is it turning the sport he loves into a soulless game of number-crunching? It's an engaging, almost exotic film.