A COMPASSIONATE SPY - Mark Reviews Movies

A Compassionate Spy, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 3, 2023

The more compelling story is right there in A Compassionate Spy, which details the life of Theodore "Ted" Hall, one of the scientists enlisted to develop the first atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project. While working on that terrible weapon of mass death and misery, Hall passed vital secrets about it to the government of the Soviet Union—a fact he refused to admit officially until about a year before his death in 1999.

This documentary from director Steve James doesn't quite tell that part of the story, perhaps because Hall's late-life interviews, partially shown here for the purpose of giving Hall a direct voice, are a matter of public record. James could simply show them, as well as a confession Hall privately recorded around the same time, in their entirety and offer some commentary by various experts. The filmmaker, though, has made a career of looking into the more personal side of the lives of his subjects, so a straightforward account of the specifics of Hall's espionage is probably the last thing James would want to present. Besides, who really knows how many of those specific details are available?

Instead, James looks to Hall's wife Joan, who survived her husband and lives a quiet life in the United Kingdom, where the couple and their children moved to after it became clear that the FBI wasn't going to fully abandon their suspicions of and investigation into Hall's activities outside of the Manhattan Project. Joan is fairly open and upfront about herself and her late husband, their shared politics, their belief that giving away secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union was an act of preventing a nuclear holocaust, and the shifting of her own opinions about the nature of the Soviet Union.

Despite the frankness of his primary interview subject and the morally weighty of the topic at hand, James' approach here almost feels haphazard. At one moment, he's offering a dueling debate of sorts about whether Hall should be known as a hero for humanity or a traitor to his country, and soon after, James is simply listening to Joan and her two living daughters reminisce about their lives after moving Cambridge. The filmmaker's otherwise admirable attention to people over narrative ultimately betrays him and this material in this case, in which maybe something more straightforward might have given us a better, wider view of Hall and his actions.

James does try, though, offering accounts directly from Hall and hearsay ones from Joan about how he passed on secrets to Soviet officials while still working for the Manhattan Project, as well as how interrogations with FBI agents went and the two became convinced there was still an ongoing investigation into him. Mostly, though, the interviews focus on why Hall did what he did, which becomes repetitive quickly with only two voices offering the justification.

Through some re-creations, we see the couple's courtship at the University of Chicago, a couple scenes of Hall and colleague/fellow spy Saville Sax discuss politics and arrange meetings with Soviet contacts, and the surreal scene of the Halls just happening to pass Sing Sing on the day of the execution of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They disagreed with the verdict, obviously, and there was no guarantee Hall wouldn't suffer a similar fate if he were to say the wrong thing, someone else were to turn, or the feds were to find useable evidence. After all, the secrets Hall gave to the Soviet Union were far more substantial in that country's ultimate development of its own nuclear weapon. There's a certain irony that another secret became the only reason Hall wasn't able to be prosecuted.

With so many ideas and perspectives (James also interviews a pair of Hall biographers and Sax's two children, one of whom believes Hall and his father to have been wrong in their actions), the documentary mostly comes across as a piecemeal account of history, guided by Joan's defiant stance in the rightness of her husband's motives and her own justification for initially believing in the politics of the Soviet Union (There's a notable section, if only for the length, in which James shows the public's mostly positive view of the country during the war). Once she understood the atrocities of Joseph Stalin's regime, Joan and, by her account, her husband started to question whether such a man should have such a weapon, without wavering in the morality of eliminating the United States' monopoly of nuclear arms or their leftist politics.

There's an undeniable complexity to everything James presents, and maybe that's the primary problem with this movie. The narrative of A Compassionate Spy seems to be arranged by the raising of those ideas and contradictions, instead of simply telling its story and allowing us to judge, appreciate, and be conflicted by them as they come. The result is a documentary that presents many points but never establishes a guiding one.

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