‘Treats its audience like adults’: why Moneyball is my feelgood movie

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

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.