It’s not an everyday occurrence to stumble upon a massively fascinating person’s story, at least not for me. I came across a film about history and, to a degree, baseball, a couple o’ topics I really dig, so I pounced on it. It was therein I was introduced to the man known as Moe Berg. That film, if you were able to read the title above, was The Catcher Was a Spy.
I was sold by the short IMDb description that proclaimed the film’s story as revolving around a baseball player moonlighting as a spy. Already a solid jumping-off point, if you ask me. Then I looked into the story behind the story. Let’s actually go.
Moe Berg is probably best known as being a decent Major League catcher, though he started out as a shortstop. He was never known to be much of a runner or hitter (though he had moments of both), but his defense was killer, and he was wicked smaht. See, after beginning his collegiate career at NYU, he transferred to Princeton, graduating magna cum laude in modern languages. He spoke a number of languages, including French, Italian, Spanish, the Classicals (that is, Latin and Greek), German, and, for some reason, Sanskrit; and he developed a taste for reading many daily newspapers from around the world. He also appeared a few times on the radio quiz show Information, Please, where he did rather well. While playing ball, he took classes at the Sorbonne and studied law at Columbia. After a nice enough career in the bigs, playing for the Robins (you may know them better by the name they eventually went by, the Dodgers), the White Sox, the Indians, the Senators, and the Red Sox, he settled into coaching for a couple of years.
Then came the Second World War. Berg entered into the intelligence service, possibly owing to his ailing knees, eventually joining the OSS (the organization that would later develop into the CIA). As part of the Balkans Desk, he parachuted into what was then occupied Yugoslavia and gathered intel on the various resistance groups in the area (his work seems to have been a determining factor in the Allies throwing more support behind the Partisans than the Chetniks and the others, helping Tito ascend to power in the area). He was then transferred to operations centering on the Nazis’ nuclear program, usually in the form of intel gathering and scientist interviewing. In particular, he was assigned to determine whether or not prominent physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg (one of my favorite scientists, for the record) was actively and/or successfully creating an atomic bomb; had Berg come to the conclusion that Heisenberg was doing so, he had orders to dispatch the physicist; obviously, he determined otherwise.
Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom after he resigned from the OSS in 1946, but he turned it down. A few years later, the CIA hired him to collect data on the Soviets’ nuclear program, but few results came of the scheme. For the remainder of his life, Berg stayed with friends and family, never holding down a job, and keeping very secretive of his goings-on. Berg died in 1972 having never written any memoirs, sadly.
As you can see, he led a pretty wild life, complete with globe-trotting, espionage, professional baseball, and who-knows-how-much knowledge and whatnot. Not a bad foundation for a film at all.
Based on the 1994 biography of the same name by Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher Was a Spy focuses on Berg’s work during World War II, specifically his work on the Heisenberg case. We see him traveling to Japan with a group of Major League all-stars in the ’30s (including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Simmons, Jimmy Foxx, and Lefty Gomez, among others), though his inclusion was more for his ability to speak Japanese than his skill on the diamond. We see him head off to Europe after the war begins and track down Heisenberg. …And that’s kinda it.
Sure, we get glimpses of the rest of Berg’s life, including his relationship with Estella Huni (whom he romanced but never married or anything), his appearances on Information, Please, and mentions of his young life as a Jew who never quite fit in, but the film really wants to press how cool this Heisenberg situation was. As a result, we never get a full portrait of the man himself, nor even his work with military intelligence: most of his work at the Balkan Desk is left out, including his on-site evaluation of the Yugoslav resistance groups.
Indeed, the film plays rather fast and loose with the historical timeline. The trip to Japan, which actually occurred just before his final few years in the bigs with the BoSox, is rather shown to have been at the end of his career; his entrance into Italy to find intel on Heisenberg is depicted as being his first active stint in the field, though he should have already been hitting Yugoslavia by this point; and some smaller details are fudged a bit in order to fit the narrative. Like I’ve said before, this is no big deal, really, as the point of the film isn’t to necessarily tell a factual story, but rather to tell a story, it’s just that the story they went with not only leaves out some juicy bits from Berg’s life, but also minimizes his impact on the war effort. Moreover, the story is kinda dull.
Sure, there’s some solid spy thriller stuff in there, to be sure, but the film is forced to stretch a small amount of time into a large-feeling singular event. And the film doesn’t do this job all too well. For example, though his Yugoslavian sojourn is left out, we’re gifted an extended scene in which Berg traverses an Italian battle site in order to get ahold of an Italian scientist with information about Heisenberg. This battle is highly unnecessary, does nothing to advance the plot, and kills the pacing, all just to seemingly show some action in this wartime flick. We get several scenes with Berg and Huni, but their relationship doesn’t further the plot any or have any bearing on the story, save possibly to deflect the constant questions about Berg’s sexuality. Yeah, for some reason, the script points out how odd it is that Berg hasn’t married anybody, hasn’t had kids, and has several characters posit that he may be gay. I have no idea why this is included, especially considering Berg may have had a minor reputation as something of a ladies’ man, and the question does nothing for the story whatsoever. It’s just odd.
Speaking of, the story of such a unique person as presented here is the result of a confluence of a unique assemblage of people. Director Ben Lewin has a handful of prior credits to his name, none all that spectacularly well-known, and all spaced out over the course of a few decades (this is his first offering in about five years). Writer Robert Rodat is likely best known for penning Saving Private Ryan, but he’s also been responsible for the scripts to, in chronological order, Tall Tale, a family film about American folk heroes coming to life; Fly Away Home, a family film about a girl helping her pet geese migrate; The Patriot, a strange historical tale from the Revolutionary War helmed by Roland Emmerich; and Thor: The Dark World. That’s an odd resume, ain’t it? The cast is top-notch, including names like Paul Rudd, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Strong, Connie Nielsen, Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Paul Giamatti, Shea Wigham, and Jeff Daniels. Didn’t think you’d be seeing Paul Rudd leading the proceedings, eh?
And that’s sorta a problem here. If you ask me, Paul Rudd’s got plenty of talent, but he’s best utilized when he’s allowed to snark it up (see as Ideal Home, Ant-Man, and his work with the Judd Apatow crew). Here, he’s hardly ever allowed to even smirk, and his portrayal of Berg is decidedly dull and kinda lifeless. This may be an artifact of Rodat making Berg seem enigmatic and mysterious (which he certainly was during his life), but it just seems like this highly interesting individual lacked any sense of humor and barely changed his communication style from a dry, milquetoast affectation. The rest of the cast is equally wasted for the most part, though Pearce and Wigham do pretty well with their relatively small roles (the latter is quickly becoming one of my favorite character actors these days), and no one really does poorly.
Still, there’s a nice noir feel to things, a throwback atmosphere to things like Foreign Correspondent and the like. Much of this is due to cinematographer Andrij Parekh (who did some good work on The Zookeeper’s Wife last year), who uses shadows, earth tones, and a vaguely tactile look to give the film a sense of historical grit, not unlike Band of Brothers and the aforementioned Saving Private Ryan. Things are also aided by a low-key score from Howard Shore, who maintains a tense atmosphere without imposing his presence on the audience. Were this film a straightforward spy thriller set during the war, it would have looked and felt just right for the occasion.
Instead, this was meant to be the story of an interesting and oddball man, and, in that regard, the film isn’t as good as it could have been. It’s fine enough for a watch, and I’m glad Berg’s story has been brought to light, but it doesn’t do anything in any way outstanding. Of course, it’s gotten me to wanna read the biography it was based on, so there’s that…
Allusions of Grandeur 