'The Catcher Was a Spy review': A real ballplayer's double life
Paul Rudd stars as Moe Berg, a baseball player who goes to work for the government during World War II, in "The Catcher Was a Spy." Credit: IFC Films/Dusan Martincek
PLOT Baseball catcher Moe Berg works undercover as a government spy.
CAST Paul Rudd, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Sienna Miller
RATED R (some sexuality, violence and coarse language)
LENGTH 1:38
BOTTOM LINE Good actors are thrown a curveball by a bland script.
Morris "Moe" Berg was an odd duck. The baseball player and coach, who played 15 seasons for a handful of major league teams, including the Washington Senators in the 1930s, came to be known as the "brainiest guy in baseball."
He spoke several languages and had an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a law degree from Columbia. Berg appeared as a regular contestant on the radio quiz show "Information Please." He was also a U.S. government spy.
During World War II, Berg worked for the Office of Strategic Services (or OSS, a precursor to the CIA), where he joined a team tasked with determining how close Germany was to developing the atomic bomb. If necessary, Berg was to assassinate the principal architect of the Nazis' nuclear ambitions: physicist Werner Heisenberg.
All of this fascinating background was well documented in Nicholas Dawidoff's 1994 "The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg." Ironically, the film version, starring Paul Rudd and directed by Ben Lewin, is conspicuous not for its brio but its blandness.
Despite the colorful character at its center, and a likable if somewhat impassive performance by Rudd, "The Catcher Was a Spy" is a dutiful laundry list of a biopic, ticking off boxes in Berg's career — brainiac, athlete, loner, secular Jew, secret agent and, as the film strongly suggests, closeted gay man — without shedding light on what makes him tick.
The film's fine supporting cast features Jeff Daniels as Berg's OSS boss; Paul Giamatti, Tom Wilkinson and Giancarlo Giannini as celebrated physicists; Guy Pearce as Berg's gruff Army handler; Sienna Miller as his frustrated girlfriend; and Mark Strong as Heisenberg.
Despite sterling performances, "The Catcher Was a Spy" ultimately loses its luster in the murk surrounding the man it calls a "walking enigma." Who really was Moe Berg? The man who, it is said, liked to smile and place a finger to his lips when asked about his life as a spy, probably wouldn't tell you. Perhaps it's fitting then that this movie, however frustrating, doesn't, either
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