THE CATCHER WAS A SPY: Rudd Offers Another Strong Dramatic Turn

Paul Rudd should act in more dramatic roles. I know. One of the most talented comedic actors in the world obviously doesn’t need to switch genres to give his career a spark; he’s been acting consistently in some of the most memorable comedic roles over the past two decades. However, his filmography also consists of a breadth of experience, and his range is impressive. Recently, Rudd delved into the dramatic arena with the coming-of-age film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the dramedy This Is 40, Judd Apatow‘s follow-up to Knocked Up, Prince Avalanche, The Fundamentals of Caring, Ideal Home, and Mute, and forayed into the action genre with Ant-Man and its sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp. The Catcher Was a Spy is Rudd‘s first biopic, second period piece, and most dramatic performance do date.

In The Catcher Was a Spy, Rudd plays real-life Major League Baseball (MLB) player Morris “Moe” Berg, an American Jewish government spy who helped the U.S. defeat Nazi Germany in the race to build the atomic bomb. Oscar-nominated screenwriter Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan) solidly adapts Nicholas Dawidoff‘s book, albeit with a slightly uneventful story, and Ben Lewin (The Sessions) directs the film in a fine fashion, albeit at a slightly detrimentally slow pace. The Catcher Was a Spy is a moderately anticlimactic but engaging character study about a secretive man who lived an unbelievable life.

Moe Berg: The Man, The Myth, The Legend

He was the son of a Jewish pharmacist, who went to Princeton at a time when Jews didn’t go to Princeton, learning seven languages including Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit (Berg spoke 10 languages overall), played professional baseball at a time when Jews didn’t play professional baseball, and received a law degree from Columbia Law School.

Baseball player and manager Casey Stengel coined Berg “the strangest man ever to play baseball.” He was an average baseball player, perhaps most well-known as “brainiest guy in baseball.” But really, his work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as a spy, was far more noteworthy than anything he did during his professional baseball career.

In The Catcher Was a Spy, Berg is tasked by the OSS to discover whether or not Nobel Winning physicist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong), the man who is running the Nazi atomic bomb program, is building an atomic bomb, and, if he is, to assassinate him. The potential ramifications of a mission of that magnitude makes Berg’s professional baseball career look like volunteer work. So, what was a man with an IQ of 170 doing in the MLB? Why did Berg never settle down? Why did he become reclusive and bury himself in his books as he grew older? As Lewin put it, people didn’t come out back then, and if it wasn’t his sexuality he was hiding, then it was something else significant about himself. He remains an enigma.

“I think that the reason Moe Berg played baseball was it helped him avoid making the sort of decisions that a man or a person makes about their life in the normal course.” said Lewin in a featurette about the film. “So, Moe’s life, in a way, was an endless postponement of deciding who he was and what he was really doing.”

Strong (Pun Intended) Performances

Rudd has more than proven himself as a leading man. However, the role of Moe Berg in The Catcher Was a Spy requires hardly any humor and a substantial amount of restraint and nuance. It is, arguably, his most challenging and complex dramatic role to date. Throughout the film, Rudd speaks Italian, German, French, Latin, and Japanese. Indeed, he learned enough of these languages in preparation for his role to sound fluent in them and have as little of an accent as possible. He also trained to look fluid as a professional baseball player, catching 80 mile-per-hour fastballs in 1940s-era baseball gloves and regularly taking batting practice in preparation for his baseball scenes.

Jeff Daniels, Tom Wilkinson, Connie Nielsen, Guy Pierce, Sienna Miller, and Paul Giamatti each turn in laudable performances. However, Strong is especially, but unsurprisingly, outstanding as Heisenberg. Strong speaks German throughout the entire film. In real life, he is fluent in German; his mother was an Austrian immigrant, and he studied at university in Munich. The entire third act of The Catcher Was a Spy is a intellectual game of cat and mouse between Rudd‘s Berg and Strong‘s Heisenberg, leading up to a nerve-wracking conclusion between their respective characters’ arcs. Strong is able to convey a whirlwind of emotional turmoil beneath the surface of his subtle, often seemingly calm facial expressions, greatly underscoring the tension during the meeting between Berg and Heisenberg.

The Technical Specs

Director Ben Lewin has had a filmmaking career spanning over four decades, three continents, and three visual mediums including narrative features, documentary features, and television. Lately, however, Lewin has had a bit of a career renaissance, beginning with 2012’s The Sessions, and continuing with the Dakota Fanning-starring Please Stand By in 2017. He seems to have a revived interest in narrative features, and it shows. He puts an incredible amount of care into every frame of The Catcher Was a Spy. The shots at the historic Fenway Park are gorgeously rendered and digitally recreated to make look like the 1940s.

Three-time Oscar-winner Howard Shore, known for his work on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, composes a typically pleasing score. Costume designer Joan Bergin and production designer Luciana Arrighi each do a fantastic job of making the people and their surroundings look and feel like the 1940s. Rodat‘s script, as aforementioned, drags at times, and it also doesn’t delve into the many facets of Moe Berg as much as it can, but perhaps that is to make Berg seem as palatable and relatable as much as possible to a wide audience.

The Catcher Was a Spy: A Worthy Espionage Biopic

“I always felt that no matter how much research I did,” Rudd told THR at Sundance this year, “and I did a lot, there was only so much I could ever know about this man. And I think that seems to be the way he wanted it. It was both interesting and frustrating, because he’s an incredible man with a fascinating story that has not been told from his perspective.”

Alas, The Catcher Was a Spy does leave the audience wanting to know more about Berg, but there was only so much he shared about his private life. He almost wrote his memoirs in 1960, but he stopped after his assigned co-writer mistook him for Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. Still, Rudd does the Berg that the public and intelligence agencies knew justice. With an engaging but slightly sluggish story, fine acting, and a committed crew, The Catcher Was a Spy mostly succeeds as both a tense espionage film and a biopic.

Do you enjoy biopics? Espionage films? What is your favorite dramatic Paul Rudd performance?

The Catcher Was A Spy was released on June 22, 2018 theatrically and on VOD in the U.S. For more information on its release, click here.