Third String Catcher, First String Spy, Minor League Movie

The Catcher Was A Spy (2018) – Based loosely on the life of major league baseball catcher Moe Berg.  It’s the story of an intelligent, well-read baseball oddball who goes to work for American intelligence during World War II, including an assignment to assassinate the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program.

Directed by Ben Lewin

Starring – Paul Rudd, Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels

Why I Liked It – There’s a good idea and a couple decent performances that I wish they had turned into an actual good movie.

 Let’s start off with complete honesty.  This movie disappointed me.  It disappointed me a lot.

I knew the story of Moe Berg long before they produced the movie.  A better than average defensive catcher with below average hitting skills, Berg was one of the legion of players who were good “team” guys.  Reliable, but unspectacular.  Add in that Berg was intelligent, well read and college educated (Princeton and Columbia Law).  He was an intellectual in sports.  Casey Stengel called him the “… strangest man to ever play baseball”.  I’ve always had a fascination with his story.

A story that gets even more complicated when he volunteers to work with the nascent American intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).  He would work as a field agent during the war including the central events of the movie.

With all that going for you, how could you possibly screw this movie up?

And yet, they did.

There are many plot threads that begin, but none tie into the larger story.  They can’t decide if Berg was bisexual (a point for which I can find NO evidence outside of the script), or if he’s madly in love with a woman (Estella), for whom they never bother with a surname.  Both these plotlines appear and disappear for no apparent reason or cause.  Neither of them figure to any significant degree in the story.  Consequently, there’s no sense of conflict that arises out of either.  The same goes for Berg’s love of baseball versus going to work for the spy agency.  The movie never takes us beyond the surface of his character.  Which is something commonly noted about the man himself.  But there’s no examination of that either!  The big assignment at the center of the movie is the investigation of how far away from developing a nuclear weapon the Nazis were in 1943.  He goes to investigate the great German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the man at the center of the research.  I won’t give the history away, but as a movie climax what happens is an utter disappointment.

I always worry about a movie that begins with an exposition in title cards.  I was unsurprised when it ended with even more of them.  The screenplay that made it to the screen is a bunch of interesting ideas that are never woven into a story.  Paul Rudd is OK as Berg, but never gives us any depth to the character.  Jeff Daniels is fine as William Donovan, the leader of the OSS, but is on the screen only briefly.  Beyond that the cast wanders through the mess of a movie without raising a murmur of care from the audience.

Rating – ** Unimpressed