Moneyball

This kind of feels like a continuation of the corporate history movies we’ve been watching, but the real reason we’re here is that after watching Aaron Sorkin’s great screenplay in The Social Network it also seemed right to finally watch this. But the question is, what the fuck do I know about baseball?

Nothing at all is the answer, nothing at all. It seems sort of like cricket but with four stops on the pitch instead of two. The great thing about Moneyball is that you only need to know this much about the game to get a lot of enjoyment out of the film.

What really makes it tick aside from the great writing is Brad Pitt - and it’s a surprise to me because I don’t remember the last time I saw him be truly great in something. Yes it’s not a wacky transformative performance but he inhabits the character; it fits him like a glove if you will.

And because of that, and everyone else in the film, Moneyball gets to be a pretty low-key affair that just lets the words and the actors do the talking. It’s quite a long film but it’s so self-assured that it will happily sit in scenes for way longer than you think it needs to.

A classic Hollywood story arc that (probably? what do I know) really happened, told in cool but utterly compelling way.