The latest in our series of writers paying tribute to their favourite comfort films is an ode to Brad Pitt and Aaron Sorkin’s lovably human baseball drama
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he older I get, the more I want to hear people talk. I want films in which recognisably human characters interact in recognisably human ways. No one need die; nothing great need be at stake. I just want to be treated like an adult. Moneyball treats its audience like adults.
Though it was released in 2011, it’s a very 1970s film: its theme is analogous to the paranoid thrillers of that decade. In Moneyball, an American institution is in the hands of an elite, and a lone man who doesn’t trust the system is trying to change things. Yes, it’s about baseball rather than the CIA, but I don’t think it’s coincidence that this is the film where Brad Pitt finally looked like the inheritor to Robert Redford.
Moneyball is proof that when you put good actors with a good script, so long as the director doesn’t go off the deep end, you’ll end up with something decent. It’s unflashy: its sports action sequences are rare – and wisely so, given that actors pretending to play professional sport is routinely an embarrassment. It’s talky: it demands that you listen to what’s being said, but makes it easy to comprehend. And it is endlessly rewatchable: the perfect plane movie, insomnia movie, sick day movie.
