The 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.
