Directed by: Bennett Miller
Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Rating: PG-13
133 minutes

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill star in "Moneyball." (Courtesy photo)

As much as it pained me to go out and see a baseball movie after you-know-what, "Moneyball" didn't actually reopen too many fresh wounds. In fact, the movie ends with a little historical tag about the Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series, and also spends a good chunk of time criticizing the Yankees. All baseball politics aside, though, "Moneyball" is a fascinating look at how baseball has transformed from a game of intuition into a game of numbers. And it all started with Billy Beane.

Beane (Brad Pitt, "Inglourious Basterds"), a first-round draft pick in 1980, was one of those players who everyone thought would be one of the greats. Five years later, Beane ended what had amounted to an abysmal blip of a career and began working behind the scenes—in the general manager's office, to be specific. In "Moneyball," we follow him, now in the early 2000s, as he tries to rebuild the Oakland Athletics with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. By chance he meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, "Superbad"), a fresh-out-of-college office peon in the Cleveland Indians system. Brand is a statistics junky, and his counterintuitive theories about building a winning team seem reasonable, and, more importantly, affordable. So Beane hires the kid, and together they go on a crusade to rebuild the A's, acquiring a bizarre assortment of no-name players and infuriating Beane's scouting staff along the way.

The team manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Doubt"), is none too happy about such antics, and certainly doesn't like being told how to do his job. But Beane and Brand are onto something, and once the rest of the team starts listening, the A's magically start soaring. Of course, it's not magic at all—it's math.

While it might seem like this is a hard movie to understand if you don't know baseball, it's accessible to everyone. That's because the script focuses on Beane's personality and his conflicts with his management staff, instead of overloading us with facts (though the scenes where they explain various pieces of information are, for the baseball literate, pretty interesting). The script balances carefully between sharp humor and serious introspection, and it's no surprise; Steven Zaillian ("Schindler's List") and Aaron Sorkin ("The Social Network") adapted the script from Michael Lewis's book. The collaboration is a good one; Sorkin tones down Zaillian's tendency towards heaviness, while Zaillian limits Sorkin's tendency towards snappy repartee. Director Bennett Miller ("Capote") leans more to Sorkin's side, giving the movie a dramatic comedy angle, as opposed to a comic drama.

Philip Seymour Hoffman in a scene from "Moneyball." (Courtesy photo)

The cast, meanwhile, is perfectly chosen. Brad Pitt is at his energetic, snacking best here, taking the lead for over two hours but making us feel like we could watch him for another two (unless it's one of the various shots of him brooding while driving). Jonah Hill's deadpan humor is spot-on, without relegating him to the comic relief character. Hoffman, in addition to the other actors playing disgruntled staff members, is good, but we don't see much of him. It makes sense, though; the main enemies standing in Beane's way are the staff as a whole, and they act as one entity, an ensemble of naysayers. Art Howe may be the most notable of the non-believers, but Hoffman doesn't overshadow the others. It's a great all-around effort, even if no one stands out above the others.

In a lot of ways, "Moneyball" is this year's "The Social Network." In addition to being written by Aaron Sorkin, they both center around a polarizing figure who revolutionized a long-standing tradition by getting technical about it. In "The Social Network," it was making friends. In "Moneyball" it's playing baseball. If you ask me, "Moneyball" is the better movie, if only because baseball has always been a more emotional phenomenon than the internet.

That's not to say that traditionalists will like this movie. It is, after all, about dehumanizing something that for years has been based on intuition. But it is exceptionally well made (except for a few unnecessary subplots – minor flaws, but noticeable nevertheless), and definitely worth seeing.

It's the best movie I've seen this year. Fittingly, though, "Moneyball" will run up against some tough competition as we get further into the fall.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.