One of the other players shirks at the idea of showering off with the catcher, a number of the stagnant dialogue scenes hinge on the “mutual pleasure” Berg finds in meeting other men, and it’s shyly implied that he goes to bed with a married Japanese guy (Sanada) he meets on a trip overseas. And it’s strongly indicated that Berg’s queerness may not have stopped there. I don’t fit.” As a Jewish man in pre-war Boston, it’s easy to understand why a public figure like him might have felt compelled to live behind a square-jawed smokescreen. His entire performance stems from a single line: “I like to hide. It’s clear that Berg is smart and speaks a half-dozen languages - people jokingly refer to him as “professor” - but his intelligence seems to make folks nervous, as no one has a good read on what he plans to do with it.Įven Rudd, who inhabits Berg like a blank matinee idol, tends to seem kind of unsure.
A low-key celebrity in the city where he keeps to himself, Berg is something of a mystery even to his teammates, and Robert Rodat’s vanilla script is very coy about sharing any of his secrets. Spanning 10 years in 87 stolid minutes, “The Catcher Was a Spy” takes us back to 1934, when Berg is an overeducated baseball player at the end of his career. It’s one thing for a critic to identify a bomb so deadly that the OSS should have sent someone to defuse it, but it might take an entire CSI team to understand how it was built. It’s obvious that something(s) went terribly wrong at some part of the process, but it’s hard to reverse-engineer the cause of this catastrophe - not even the most disastrous movies come equipped with a black box.
Read More: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Trailer: Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly Team Up to Show the Power of Superhero BugsĮven after making it to the end of this lifeless husk of a film (and reading through all 842 of the title cards that are waiting for you after the action fades to black), the answer to that question is still unclear. In the immortal words of “A History of Violence” baddie Richie Cusack: “How do you fuck that up!?” ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Season 3 Shines Because Cracking the Case Wasn’t That Hard
Throw in an all-star cast that surrounds Paul Rudd’s lead performance with pinch-hitters like (take a deep breath) Paul Giamatti, Mark Strong, Tom Wilkinson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Shea Whigman, Jeff Daniels, Connie Nielsen, and the great Giancarlo Giannini, and you’ve got a film that feels like a grand slam even before it steps up to the plate.
It’s a hell of a war story, combining the foreign intrigue of “The Third Man” with the high-wire suspense of “Where Eagles Dare” (with a touch of homoerotic tension drizzled on top for good measure). Adapted from Nicholas Dawidoff’s historical biography of the same name, “ The Catcher Was a Spy” is a stiff and serene biopic about a man named Moe Berg, an enigmatic Jew who capped off his middling career with the Boston Red Sox by traveling to Nazi Germany under secret government orders to determine if Hitler was building an atomic bomb, and to assassinate the Nobel Prize-winning scientist in charge of the project if so. On paper, this should have been a home run.
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