Movie reviews

HOLLYWOOD’S ongoing love affair with the sport of baseball continues with Moneyball (PG), although Bennett Miller’s film is unusual in two respects.

The first is that the story, which is based on the experiences of real-life Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) during the 2002 season, goes out of its way to debunk the mythology of baseball, while the second is that most of the action takes place away from the baseball diamond, in the offices where hard-nosed negotiating takes place. Strapped for cash and haemorrhaging top players, Beane hires geeky economics graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), whose number-crunching theory suggests that the so-called experts don’t understand the fundamentals of baseball success. Can the Oakland A’s triumph using Brand’s radical theories?

The answer to that question is less important than the question itself, which underpins what is ostensibly a sports movie with a more universal theme about refusing to accept the status quo, and having the courage of your convictions. Pitt and Hill make for a quirky but very likeable partnership, and they get strong support from Philip Seymour Hoffman as the put-upon baseball coach.

WELCOME to the Rileys (15A) is another movie with a life-affirming message of optimism in the face of daunting odds, albeit one rooted in a personal tragedy. The loss of their daughter in a car accident has eviscerated the marriage of Doug and Lois Riley (James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo), to the extent that their marriage is now little more than a comfortless shell. On a business trip to New Orleans, Doug encounters 16-year-old Mallory (Kristen Stewart), a lap dancer and occasional prostitute who reminds him far too vividly of his own loss. The relationship which develops between them has its poignant moments, but Jake Scott’s film doesn’t offer easy answers to any of the characters, particularly when Lois follows Doug to New Orleans, and realises why he is so obsessed with protecting Mallory from herself.

The story holds out the tantalising promise of redemption on one side, and rehabilitation on the other, but essentially this exercise in tough love is engaged in celebrating our faults and failings for their capacity to render us more fully human. A thoughtful big screen debut from Ridley Scott’s son, this bittersweet offering benefits from strong but understated performances from its three central figures.

ADAPTED by Terence Davies from a Terence Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea (15A) is set in post-WWII London, and stars Rachel Weisz as Hester, an attractive young woman who throws over her distinguished husband, Sir William (Simon Russell Beale), for former fighter pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). The film opens with a suicide attempt by Hester, which sets the tone for a tale with strong overtones of a classical Greek tragedy, the mood enhanced by heavily stylised camera work composed of deliberately artificial compositions. Ultimately, however, the film succeeds as a character study in conscience, as Hester struggles with guilt and morality, vainly attempting to adapt her desires to a society which has yet to make allowances for a war which has irrevocably sundered one generation’s values from the next. Hiddleston and Russell Beale provide Weisz with sterling support.

WEISZ co-stars alongside Daniel Craig in Dream House (15A), the pair playing Ann and Will Atenton, parents of a pair of young girls and proud new owners of a house that quickly reveals a dark history when Ann begins the laborious process of fixing it up. Is the house really haunted by the ghosts of the woman and children murdered there some years previously, or are the Atenton’s victims of a pranks and their own hyperactive imaginations? Jim Sheridan’s latest film offers a fascinating set-up, and Craig and Weisz — who met on-set, and subsequently married — provide more sophisticated acting chops than haunted house movies generally warrant. That said, there’s little on show here than any true horror buff won’t have encountered before.