'Moneyball' compelling and sweet

'Moneyball' is an underdog tale of a different kind, one that questions the enchantment of the game rather than embraces it.

While a film driven by sports statistics and business may sound drab, it manages to discover its own, unique sentimentality thanks to strong performances and a restrained style.

We pick up with Billy Beane (Pitt), GM for the Oakland A's, after yet another disastrous season. Surrounded by aging scouts convinced of their ability to hone in on a player's intangible skills, the keen manager grapples with the loss of his best players, a recruiting budget dwarfed by his competitors and no solution in sight.

After all, baseball is a game of the coin—buy the talent, buy the wins, buy the championship. Wheeling and dealing across the country, Beane realizes the A's need a new strategy or they'll be forever at the bottom.

He finds that innovation in Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a statistics wiz who introduces Beane to the baseball equivalent of counting cards: the theory of sabermetrics.

Thankfully, watching and enjoying 'Moneyball' doesn't require an extensive background in math, as Beane allows the stuffy, subdued Brand do the number-crunching.

Much like writer Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-winning 'The Social Network', the script (co-written with 'Schindler's List' and 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' writer Steve Zallian) pulls back the curtain on a complicated process, but makes it easily digestible, and more importantly, emotional.

Beane puts his job and reputation on the line for Brand's theory, which boils down to the idea that all you need to win a baseball game is runs. Who needs star players when MLB rejects can make it to home base?

Pitt's depiction of the real life Beane isn't a showy, star performance — but it's one of his best to date. The character is reserved and hushed; he explodes when the gravity of his situation hits a boiling point, but quickly pulls himself back into professional mode.

In order for Beane to enact Brand's plan, he has to de-romanticize a game that means everything to him. Beane goes to great lengths to remind himself that baseball can't be fun — he doesn't watch the games, he commands his team to hear the sorrow-filled silence of a loss and he emphasises that no matter how many games he wins, the only one that matters is the last.

Beane keeps this light and cool with his co-workers, but underneath — where Pitt shines — he struggles.

While 'Moneyball' is Pitt's show, his ensemble of co-stars deliver equally impressive work. Hill plays against type, keeping his usual fast-talking humor in his back pocket and letting the larger-than-life Pitt properly wow him.

Philip Seymour Hoffman appears briefly as the A's manager Art Howe, who butts heads with Beane over the direction of the team. What could have been a surface-level villainous role is elevated by Hoffman, who makes the old-school way of thinking sound perfectly reasonable.

The film, directed by the Oscar-nominated Bennett Miller ('Capote'), is slow and methodical, paving the way for exhilarating moments between Pitt and Hill as they juggle phone calls, fire off statistics, educate their players and compile the misfit team.

Miller intertwines flashbacks of Beane's early career and real life footage into the main narrative, capitalizing on a variety of filmmaking techniques that organically stem from Beane's perspectives.

This isn't squeaky clean Hollywood filmmaking, but it's slick. Mychael Danna's score stands out as a thrilling companion to the visuals, ethereal tunes that add a touch of humanity to a bookish drama.

'Moneyball' isn't this year's 'Field of Dreams' or 'The Natural' or 'Little Big League', but it is great drama.

Compelling and sweet, the film takes a relatively unknown aspect of a well-known sport and turns it into something grand.

Baseball's always made for a great life metaphor, but 'Moneyball' shows us one we've never seen before.

Star Rating: 4/5