The Catcher Was A Spy

The Catcher Was A Spy is a curious movie (with no apparent allusion to ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ intended) a production that is at once an impressively well-crafted real-life thriller story but devoid of suspense and completely underwhelming. So unpersuasive is it one can only wonder why they bothered to make the film at all.   

Paul Rudd plays former major league baseball player Moe Berg who lived a double life working for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, in World War II Europe and late in proceedings was given the assignment, should he deem it necessary, to assassinate prominent German physicist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) who the Allies believed was on the verge of giving the Nazis an atomic bomb.

The material here has great potential, pivoting as it does on challenging moral issues in the context of an unprecedented scale of global conflict yet director Ben Lewin manages to keep it all at arm’s length and remarkably, given what is at stake, barely raises a pulse.

To what extent this was the fault of the script by Robert Rodat, who wrote Saving Private Ryan (1998) and to what extent it was Lewin’s I cannot say but a readily identifiable error is the mis-casting of Rudd in the lead role. Presumably Rudd, somewhat like John Cusack and Hugh Grant in their day, is trying to divest himself of his go-to rom-com and comedy persona of photogenic (he was nearly fifty when he made this film!) boy-next-door type. Understandable, but his disengaged performance here is not going to do it, his Berg, much as he is a spy and therefore of intentionally low visibility, barely emerges as a rounded character.

Whilst there are some effective, if small, support roles including Guy Pearce as a U.S. military advisor and Jeff Daniels as the OSS director, Paul Giamatti is also miscast as a Dutch-American physicist but Strong in a very dodgy wig as Heisenberg takes the cake of incongruity.

One can only surmise that some kind of unbridgeable disconnect occurred between conception and execution and the evident good intentions somehow slipped between the cracks.

 

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