Susan Granger’s review of “The Catcher Was a Spy” (IFC Films)
It’s easy to understand why – after reading Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 best-seller “The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg” – filmmakers thought it would make a fascinating W.W.II melodrama.
Enigmatic Moe Berg (Paul Rudd) was real Renaissance man, a Major League Baseball player who graduated from Princeton and earned a law degree from Columbia. He read 10 newspapers daily and spoke 12 languages, including Latin, Japanese, Turkish, Sanskrit and Hindi.
Displaying prodigious linguistic skills and remarkable athleticism, he convinced Office of Strategic Services Chief William “Wild Bill” Donovan (Jeff Daniels) that he was perfectly suited for overseas espionage. (The OSS was the CIA’s precursor.)
Previously when he was playing exhibition games in Japan, Berg climbed to the roof of the tallest building in Tokyo to film shipyards, industrial complexes and military installations on his own movie camera, turning the valuable, undercover footage over to the U.S. government.
In 1944, Berg was given an important mission: to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the Nazi atomic bomb program, ascertain its progress and, if necessary, assassinate ambitious scientist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong), who won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for pioneering quantum physics.
Keeping a cyanide capsule in his pocket, Berg was accompanied to Europe by U.S. military specialist Robert Furman (Guy Pearce) and renowned Dutch-American physicist Samuel Goudsmit (Paul Giamatti).
The legendary Yankees/Mets manager Casey Stengel once noted, “Moe Berg was the strangest man to ever play the game of baseball.”
Unfortunately, the superficial script by Robert Rodat (“Thor: The Dark World,” “Saving Private Ryan”) and Australian director Ben Lewin (“Please Stand By,” “The Sessions”) never captures his elusive essence. It’s known that Berg played down his Jewish faith and, perhaps successfully, hid his rumored homosexuality by courting Estella Huni (Sienna Miller), an attractive piano teacher.
But lacking both suspense and believability, the film relies far too much on text-filled title cards.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Catcher Was a Spy” is a frustrating 5, keeping more secrets than it reveals.
