‘Moneyball’ hits it out of the cinematic park

Rest assured, Oscar season is here. Moneyball

Directed by Bennett Miller

Starring: Brad Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jonah Hill

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Rest assured, Oscar season is here.

Leading the way so far is “Moneyball,” the big screen adaptation of Michael Lewis’ influential yet controversial look into the life of a small-market baseball club navigating the treacherous landscape of a league dominated by the likes of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

Brad Pitt plays the roguish and amorphous Billy Beane, a big-league bust turned Oakland A’s general manager. Confronted with the loss of three rising stars and a payroll unable to keep them, Beane is forced to create winners out of undervalued — and inexpensive — ballplayers.

To do this, Beane plucks up Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an undervalued wunderkind drudging through his first job in Major League Baseball. Through Beane’s charismatic drive and Brand’s innovative approach to player evaluation, the A’s shock the establishment and make the postseason with a roster full of young talent, midseason trades and waiver-wire pickups.

The screenplay, co-written by Steve Zaillian (“American Gangster,” “Schindler’s List”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”), relies largely on the underdog narrative, with much ado about Beane’s unorthodox and thrifty strategy for fielding a winning ball club. The more nuanced details of baseball sabermetrics and talent evaluation are glossed over. Instead, Miller opts for quick cutting montages of Hill discussing his methodology with Beane and players alike, giving the audience a digestible, yet developed scope of the inner workings of a professional baseball team.

Notably, Miller makes the effort to take viewers inside closed-door negotiations. Scenes involving Beane hustling on the phone and bartering with other general managers are especially enjoyable and illustrate the daily grind for an effective sports executive.

Like a true Oscar contender of its kind, “Moneyball” is slow, introspective and deliberate. The fast-cracking quips and rapid-fire dialogue so synonymous with Sorkin’s scripts are traded for drawn-out scenes of Beane driving a pickup truck through industrial Oakland. Miller marshals up numerous scenes of Beane in solitary, stoic contemplation, allowing Pitt plenty of time to convince the academy that he is indeed Billy Beane, the champion of the downtrodden and poor. Moreover, audiences will find it easy to cheer for Beane and Brand as rogues fighting the system and challenging age-old wisdom and methods.

Despite strong performances, effective directing and sharp writing, “Moneyball” suffers from the lack of an ending. In the film’s defense, Lewis’ book doesn’t offer much closure and poses more questions than it offers answers. True to form, Miller and the writers try desperately to compensate by attempting to breathe life into a film that grinds slowly to a halt: The potentially exciting side story of the A’s record-breaking run of 20 straight wins takes an inordinate amount of time to play out.

By the end, existential phrases revolving around “changing the game” and shaking up the establishment by “threatening the way they do things” are all the audience can chew on once the final credits roll.