The Catcher Was a Spy (2018)

[Edgy MD]

Moe is a major league backup catcher in the twilight of his career. He likes staying in the game even though he's expendable, and his singularness and intellectual heft make for good (if distorted) copy for the local columnists.

When an All-Star goodwill tour of Japan is planned by the Major Leagues, the team includes Ruth and Gehrig and Averill, but then as now, they have to stretch the meaning of "star" in order to get a complete roster, so Berg is invited.

While there, he takes the initiative to take aerial footage of Tokyo with his personal movie camera. When the war starts, this footage becomes his ticket into the O.S.S., where he's assigned to a small squad tasked with finding and (if deemed necessary) killing Werner Heisenberg. Intrigue ensues.

Adapted from the book of the same title by Nicholas Dawidoff, but narrower in focus.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Yeah I think I saw this and forgot it because it wasn't so good. I read the book which wasn't so bad at all

[Frayed Knot]

I remember starting the book and then for some reason not finishing it. I don't remember why.
Didn't even realize there WAS a movie.

[Edgy MD]

There actually is a second film, The Spy Behind Home Plate, a documentary by Aviva Kempner. And perhaps I should check that out.

This one is, well it's not awful, but it does some real superimposing. Dawidoff's bio digs deeply into Berg's rep as an enigma and aloof and a lifelong bachelor. This is the sort of thing biographers make hay out of, because if you can't find enough biographical material on a subject, you fill the space by writing about how frustrating it is. Sometimes he really is a mysterious guy, but sometimes he's just a mystery, because you haven't been able to find the source material.

So yeah, he was an aloof figure. That's not surprising for a Princeton graduate who mastered at least eight languages and continued to miss Spring Training while pursuing graduate degrees. But the film takes one speculative passage about Berg's possible sexuality from the book and RUNS WITH IT. So we have Berg presented as either a bisexual, or an outright gay guy hiding in a relationship with a woman he can't give himself to. The worst part is that it is never explicitly said or shown, but presented in a 100 looks and touches and implications and visits to clubs in questionable parts of town, as if they wanted plausible deniability after the fact. Perhaps the film was spurred by the success of The Imitation Game, and somebody in Hollywood wanted to show that, hey, the US owed her wartime success to a tormented gay guy too.

But it's really an unfair leap to make based on no real evidence. (Most accounts present Berg as a real ladies' man.) With that selected as the main theme, some real themes from Berg's story get little or no traction. While Jewish families were fleeing Lithuania because of pogroms, Berg's family was more secular, and left for the United States because they found living in an all-Jewish village to be oppressive. Interesting! Berg was a career bench player, but always had a job because most teams wanted at least one Jewish player on the roster for the swelling urban Jewish populations to root for. Interesting! He only became a catcher halfway through his big league career because three catchers in a row were injured and one of the other players pointed to him and said they had seen him warming pitchers up. His first start was catching a knuckleballer! While he still continued to hit like a sucker, he became a top defensive catcher, despite his lack of experience. Interesting!

But his wartime service is the real story. The team assigned to pursue Heisenberg is left to wrestle over whether he can make an atomic bomb, and whether he would. They actually make some poetry in that the author of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is the subject of so much uncertainty. But the real interesting part of the dilemma that they miss is whether Heisenberg was ever the right person at all. As the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle attests, he was a brilliant theorist, but applied science and engineering was not his game at all, and neither was group management. At least some in American intelligence were of the opinion that they shouldn't interfere with Heisenberg leading the Nazi A-Bomb project because he reputedly didn't know how to change the battery in his car, and kidnapping or killing him might lead the Nazis to replace him with someone more competent.

Interesting! But Heisenberg, sort of a textbook version of the rumpled, absent-minded professor with the hair askew, is presented here as handsome, impeccably tailored, engaged, and present-minded.

The Heisenberg mission was a big part of Berg's spy life, but not all of it. But that's the story they want to tell, and while they don't quite get it right, it's a lot closer to the established narrative (and much of Berg's story has been declassified since Dawidoff's book was published, than the gay thing. They don't even have him on the right team when he made his trip to Japan (which was actually his second trip), and when they show him in Boston's clubhouse, he's surrounded by well known historical baseball figures, but the homophobic rookie who follows him through the city to confirm his suspicions is named "Bill Dalton," a name that appears nowhere on the baseball register. Cop. Out.

So, yeah, if you liked Bridge of Spies or The Imitation Game, it's a good-enough film. But if you actually are interested in the actual Moe Berg story, this probably will disappoint. But you know, as Katheen Madigan said, that's what you get for reading.

[Benjamin Grimm]

There actually is a second film, The Spy Behind Home Plate, a documentary by Aviva Kempner. And perhaps I should check that out.

I TOTALLY should check that out. My girlfriend's late grandfather (whom I never met) worked with Moe Berg in Italy during the war and was interviewed for that film. If you find it streaming anywhere, please let me know.

[dinosaur jesus]

I saw it in the theater. I walked out maybe halfway through. I don’t know if it was terrible, but it was all wrong. There was no sense of what was interesting about Moe Berg. Paul Rudd wasn’t like him at all, physically—Berg was a big, jowly, five o’clock shadow sort of man, a cultured sophisticate in a bruiser’s body—and he played him as a naif, an ordinary guy in over his head. Berg’s whole whole thing was convincing people he knew more than he did, that he was the only person in the room who knew what was really going on. He was a bluffer, and a bit of a fraud—genuinely brilliant, but maybe not as intellectually accomplished as he let people think. And probably not that much of a spy. So there’s a really good idea for a story there—a man who liked being unknowable, saw himself as born to be an international, finding himself in real trouble, with real spies. Is his bluff going to be called? And so on.

They also managed to make a movie with Babe Ruth in it no fun at all. How is that even possible?

[Edgy MD]

Agreed that your angle would have been better.