|
|
THE CATCHER WAS A SPY
Director: Ben Lewin Cast: Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti, Guy Pearce, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Mark Strong, Tom Wilkinson, Connie Nielsen, Hiroyuki Sanada, Giancarlo Giannini, Shea Whigham MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:38 Release Date: 6/22/18 (limited) |
|
Review by Mark Dujsik | June 21, 2018 Morris "Moe" Berg was not a great baseball player compared to his contemporaries in the professional leagues. His batting stats weren't even up to the average of most ballplayers, and as a catcher, he was the back-up for the most part. After his career ended in 1939, he need something to do, and why shouldn't that something be spying for the United States government during World War II? This wasn't too far-fetched an idea. The real Berg spoke several language fluently, as well as a few more passably, and often appeared on a radio quiz show where he would show off his extensive knowledge of linguistics, history, and current affairs. The man was smart—not just for a profession that doesn't really require such knowledge but just in general. This made him a bit of an odd man out among his peers. On the other hand, it put him in a close-to-perfect position to infiltrate the world of foreign science enterprises during the war—namely, the Nazi government's program to work in nuclear physics, possibly to create a bomb. The Catcher Was a Spy portrays Berg as a man of great intellect, of deep patriotism, of surprising humility, and of many secrets. It quickly establishes all of this about the character, and then Robert Rodat's screenplay, based on Nicholas Dawidoff's same-titled biography of Berg, lets the events of Berg's espionage take over completely. The shift toward spy craft is far less fascinating than the man behind it. The movie's Berg, played with generic charm and not much else by Paul Rudd, has so much potential for conflict, both because of who he is and how others might respond to those qualities in the late 1930s and early-to-mid 1940s. He's of Jewish ethnicity, although not a participant in the faith. He is either a closeted gay man, who frequents underground clubs and stealthily seeks out sexual partners, or secretly bisexual, enjoying the company of both men and women. Whether or not the movie's portrayal of Berg's possible sexual orientations is accurate, this could, one would imagine, put him in a precarious position within baseball and, later, within a government agency that's partly overseen by the military. Rodat, though, dismisses these potential conflicts, seeing the professional baseball leagues as places of uncaring tolerance, save for a bigot or two, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, as an institution that only cares about a person's allegiance to the country. One wonders the point of focusing so intently on what makes Berg different, when the rest of the movie only cares about putting him at the center of some routine spy games. After a brief flash-forward just before the climactic standoff with his target, the story begins in 1938 in Boston, as Berg's career as a professional player is winding down. He's dating Estella (Sienna Miller), who's upset that her beau has never shown any interest in marriage, but also sneaking into clubs and seeking trysts with men. When confronted by another player who follows him one night, Berg ambushes the man and attacks him into silence. While on an exhibition tour in Japan, Berg records some film of a naval yard in Tokyo, thinking it might be useful for the inevitable war between the U.S. and Japan. When the U.S. becomes involved in the world war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he takes the footage to Gen. William Donovan (Jeff Daniels), the director of the OSS, and from there, Berg becomes an agent with the organization. His eventual mission is to find Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong), the German physicist who won the Nobel Prize for creating quantum mechanics. Heisenberg returned to his homeland after the war began, and the U.S. believes he might be capable of heading the development of an atomic bomb. Along with Samuel Goudsmit (Paul Giamatti), another physicist, and Maj. Robert Furman (Guy Pearce), Berg's task is to discover if Heisenberg is able and willing to create a nuclear weapon for the Nazis. If the scientist is, the job is to kill him. The mission simply feels like going through the motions, taking Berg through a war zone in Italy and, ultimately, to Zurich, where he enlists the aid of yet another physicist (played by Tom Wilkinson) to draw Heisenberg out of Germany. The movie suggests that ballplayer-turned-spy's ability to so effectively engage in espionage came from his decades of practice of downplaying his ethnicity and hiding his sexuality, but that's about as deep as this goes as a study into what drew Berg into working for the government as a spy. He also has some esoteric sympathy for Heisenberg, who came up with the uncertainty principle—a concept that, in Berg's mind, relates to his own life. These are surface-level observations, though. The Catcher Was a Spy is a dutiful dramatization of a curious piece of history, but the movie is too interested in offering a play-by-play (No pun intended) of Berg's actions to explore the character any further than what's necessary to move the plot forward. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
Buy Related Products
|
(for some sexuality, violence and language)
