Out of the park

“Moneyball’’ may well be the quietest, most contemplative big-time sports movie ever made, and it builds a surprisingly affecting central metaphor from the main premise of its heroes’ insurgent management philosophy: to find players who have been undervalued by old-school baseball types because their obvious flaws - too fat, too slow, can’t field, can’t throw - obscure their virtues, chief among which is the ability to get on base by drawing a boring old walk.

Written and produced by some of the same people who brought you “The Social Network,’’ “Moneyball’’ is similarly a rare attempt to make a movie about being smart - not smart in an action-movie way, like James Bond or Jason Bourne, but smart like people who do well in school. Brand’s talent for math drives the whole film, not only its sports story but its ability to evoke sympathy for its variously flawed, undervalued characters.

Hollywood has never been very good at finding ways to tell stories about this kind of intelligence. It’s hard to render visually, and a movie that flirts with serious consideration of it will usually chicken out and return to the safer territory of explosions, sex, sentiment, or yucks. After an advance screening of “Moneyball’’ in Boston, Hill, whose understated performance is an impressive departure from playing articulate horny losers in slacker comedies, said, “I’d never actually played a character who’s good at anything.’’

“Moneyball’’ eschews Hollywood’s typical strategies for representing intelligence. There’s no impossibly fast and witty repartee, for instance, which would clash with the film’s embrace of baseball’s slow charm.