You will enjoy this movie if you like sci-fi and fantasy. It is definitely not a baseball biopic nor a spy-thriller action movie; if those are the genres you expect, you will be disappointed. If you open your mind to intellectual puzzles, you might like it. Moe Berg was a real person--a genius with degrees from Princeton and Columbia, a polyglot, and a catcher for the Red Sox. During World War II he worked for the OSS investigating Nazi Germany's progress toward an atomic bomb. The German atomic weapons program was guided by Werner Heisenberg, a scientist who had made major contributions to quantum theory and formulated the "uncertainty principle" that at the quantum level we can specify a particle's velocity or its position, but not both--in short, at the quantum level, particles are rather "fuzzy" and hard to pin down beyond a degree of probability that they are "somewhere around here." The movie raises the question how Heisenberg felt about his new mission--was he alienated from it because he was not an enthusiastic Nazi and/or because of the bomb's consequences for humanity? What I have read about the history of the German atom-bomb project suggests that as a German nationalist (rather than a Nazi) Heisenberg was not all that opposed to the project and exercised strong, brilliant leadership in it. But it was a doomed effort--building an atomic bomb is not easy, and in the last year or two of the war, the German project faced enormous logistic difficulties in producing the enriched uranium, structuring the weapon, and organizing a method for detonating a fission bomb. Constant Allied bombing meant that the work had to be constantly "on the move" --unlike Los Alamos. The fact that the German defense establishment had been disorganized, divided and internally competitive did not help matters. Moe Berg was sent into all this uncertainty to figure out how far the project had been developed (probably factually accurate) and to "deal with" Heisenberg (the direct encounter of the two men takes place in the movie, but probably not in real life, so this is a "parallel universe" part of the story). The movie unfolds around these many uncertainties and does so in a series of mood pieces, striking images (I was especially taken by the synagogue, but there are many gorgeous locations and sets), and partially explored corridors of the maze of possible events. Berg remains an enigmatic figure, and if "enigma" calls to mind Alan Turing's cracking the Nazi code and his terrible punishment for being gay, this connection is not coincidental. But in Berg's case, his sexuality also remains to some degree "uncertain." Some viewers will enjoy the real life story, the strange twists of the movie, the striking images, and Paul Rudd's performance.
Review of The Catcher Was a Spy
