DVD of the Week: Moneyball

It’s not a movie to watch for a vision of the world, for the revelation of inner life, or for psychological reverberations. Rather, “Moneyball” (which I discuss in this clip) offers that synergistic joy of a script that incisively represents its subject, performances that bring it to life with swing, and a clear but surprising plotting of action along the story’s thematic axes. The often-discussed core of the film—the application to baseball of statistical analyses that bypass familiar approaches to player evaluation and game strategy—isn’t the subject but it is the MacGuffin: the movie is about putting a new idea into practice. The process under the microscope isn’t that of playing baseball, but of management. In the role of the Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane, Brad Pitt—an admirable actor who is at once bigger and a little smaller than life (that’s the secret to his charm, to the humanity of his swagger, and the reason for his splendid incarnation of Benjamin Button)—blossoms, doing something he has never done as well: speaking. It’s as if, as Beane, Pitt seems to have found his own voice; I look forward to seeing—to hearing—whether it will carry into other roles.