Sundance ’18: The Catcher was a Spy

According to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, Werner Heisenberg’s commitment to Germany’s atomic bomb program was an ambiguous uncertainty that bedeviled the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr years after the war ended. An American OSS agent had to make that determination based on a few hours observation and a brief conversation. He was not a physicist, he was a professional baseball player. Nicholas Dawidoff’s bestselling chronicle of Morris “Moe” Berg’s WWII service is now dramatized in Ben Lewin’s The Catcher was a Spy, which screens during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Berg was a member of the Boston Red Sox, but please do not hold that against him. He was a dependable but not spectacular journeyman player, who held roster spots on several teams. He spoke several languages, including German and Italian, and regularly read foreign policy journals. As a result, he had the foresight to film Tokyo harbor during a 1934 exhibition tour, well before Pearl Harbor. Once the war started, Berg’s talents and his 16mm film attracted the attention of “Wild Bill” Donovan and the OSS, the CIA’s predecessor agency.

Eager for field work, Berg gets his chance when Donovan orders him to prevent the retreating Germans from abducting or killing Italian scientist Edoardo Amaldi, with the help of Dutch physicist Samuel Goudsmit and Major Robert Furman, the Manhattan Project’s intelligence chief (who would later oversee construction of the Pentagon). However, their Italian mission will lead to a trickier assignment in Zurich. Berg is to meet with Heisenberg, assess the status of the German Atomic program, determine whether Heisenberg is trying to advance or hinder its progress, and if the former proves true, kill him.

Without question, Berg is one of the great, under-heralded figures of World War II history. Arguably, he is the sort of renaissance man you just do not find anymore. He was also a “confirmed bachelor,” which led to plenty of speculation that Robert Rodat’s screenplay continues to stoke. Be that as it may, the film also nicely captures the intriguing milieu of the Donovan-era OSS.

Paul Rudd is does some of his best work bringing out the personal contradictions of the deeply patriotic and borderline-savant-like Berg. He also develops some ambiguously potent chemistry with Sienna Miller in the otherwise under-written role of Berg’s lover, Estella Huni. Catcher is also packed with colorful and convincing supporting turns, including Paul Giamatti as the humanistic Goudsmit, Mark Strong as the evasive Heisenberg, and the great Tom Wilkinson as Paul Scherrer, the Swiss anti-Nazi physicist, who brokered the meeting between Berg and Heisenberg.

It is just tremendously refreshing to see a film that celebrates American intelligence operatives as heroes. It also thinks quite highly of scientists and soldiers. It is a fascinating true story and a well-crafted period production. Very highly recommended for fans of historical intrigue (like Bridge of Spies), The Catcher was a Spy screens again this morning (1/25) and Saturday (1/27) in Park City and Sunday (1/28) in Salt Lake, as part of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

NYFF ’16: The Lost City of Z

Col. Percival Fawcett was like Harry Faversham in The Four Feathers, except it was his breeding that was suspect rather than his courage. There was nothing Fawcett could do to change his lineage, so he definitely believes he has something to prove. As Fawcett sees it, the Amazonian rain forest is the place to do it. He will return several times to continue his obsessive search for a mythical fallen civilization in James Gray’s adaptation of the bestselling nonfiction narrative The Lost City of Z, which screened as the closing night selection of the 54th New YorkFilm Festival.

If you had to share a foxhole with an officer, Fawcett would a good choice. He would certainly seem to be part of the privileged class in today’s world, but not enough so for his contemporaries. Consequently, he has no medals to show for his lifetime of military service. Fawcett keenly feels such slights, so he embraces the opportunity offered by an attachment to a Royal Geographical Society’s mapping expedition in Bolivia. Although things turn dire rather quickly, Fawcett and his comrades Henry Costin and Arthur Manley will successfully complete their objective. Along the way, Fawcett picks up the scent of an ancient fallen city buried within the jungle. It might just be the fabled El Dorado, but Fawcett prefers to call it Z (or rather the British “Zed”).

Fawcett will return with subsequent expeditions hoping to find Z and the glory that would come with it. Unfortunately, the money for his second campaign comes with participation of his benefactor, alleged explorer James Murray, whose girth and sloth weighs down the party like an anchor. Meanwhile, Nina Fawcett waits patiently at home with their increasingly resentful eldest son Jack.

Naturally, Gray goes to ridiculous lengths to suggest Fawcett was more culturally sensitive and humane than your average colonial glory-hunter. Frankly, it feels like a case of protesting too much, but at least it doesn’t waterlog the on-screen adventure.

The sweeping visual scale and lush, shot-on-location backdrops represent a welcome throwback to epic filmmaking in the tradition of David Lean and Alexander Korda. Cinematographer Darius Khondji (who also lensed The City of Lost Children) fully capitalizes on the verdant vistas, probably setting himself up for a second Oscar nomination. Yet, Gray and company show more interest in the Fawcetts’ private family life than Henry Hathaway allowed for the Bengal Lancer.

Charlie Hunnam is clearly comfortable returning to his Northern English roots as Fawcett. Despite his limited range, he nicely conveys the human foibles driving Fawcett’s manic compulsion. Likewise, Sienna Miller teases out a fully dimensional portrait of his loyal (but maybe not quietly so) wife Nina. Robert Pattinson (the Y-chromosome Jennifer Anniston) completely disappears into the role of flinty Henry Costin to an admirable and almost shocking extent. Yet it is Angus Macfadyen (Robert the Bruce in Braveheart) who really supplies the X-Factor as Murray, Fawcett’s appropriately flamboyant antagonist.

It is strange to imagine a reasonably proper British officer slogging through the South American rain forest, but Gray adeptly positions him as an inspirational tragic figure rather than the cautionary sort. He also recreates the horrors of WWI just as well as anything you will see in Testament of Youth. It is a good, solid historical tale of derring-do, but the fact that such films are now the preserve of private equity productions and film festival premieres rather than the Hollywood studio system (such as it is) happens to be rather depressing. Recommended as a sweaty, slightly Conradian cinematic outing, The Lost City of Z is due to open in April 2017, after screening as the closing film of the 2016 NYFF.