A Compassionate Spy Review: Steve James’s Compassionate-to-a-Fault Portrait of Ted Hall

The film is in tension with the more nuanced view that Ted Hall seemed to have of himself.

A Compassionate Spy
Photo: Kartemquin Films

The leaking of atomic bomb secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union is usually associated with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage in 1953. But according to Steve James’s new documentary A Compassionate Spy, far more crucial secrets were smuggled to Soviet agents by the film’s subject, Ted Hall. A physics prodigy who was recruited out of Harvard to work at Los Alamos when he was only 18, Ted was initially proud of his research as a way of ensuring that the Nazis didn’t develop a bomb first. But he turned to espionage out of worry that leaving a weapon that powerful in the hands of America alone would be catastrophically destabilizing to the postwar world.

A gentle piece of work that’s about as far away from cloak-and-dagger skullduggery as could be imagined, A Compassionate Spy is in part the story of an idealistic teenager who risked the electric chair in order to keep American hegemony at bay. But even though Ted isn’t a household name, that story was largely told already by interviews Ted gave before his death in 1999 and a 1997 book, Bombshell, whose authors are interviewed here in order to fill in more background detail. Given that, James focuses more intently on Ted’s character and family.

Advertisement

This aspect of A Compassionate Spy is related in glowing terms by Ted’s widow, Joan, a fellow student at the University of Chicago whom he married after the war. Spiky, unapologetic, and passionate, Joan paints their romance in glowing and lyric language and describes his actions with stark simplicity: “Ted was trying to prevent a holocaust.”

Occasionally, James interrupts his talking-head interviews with Joan and their daughters with dramatic recreations—Ted miserable at Los Alamos; Ted and Joan’s infatuation; Ted’s plotting with his friend Saville Sax, who the film suggests may have been the one to talk him into it—whose desaturated colors and dreamy style recalls a less hyperbolic version of that used by Errol Morris in Wormwood. It’s a rich and glowing portrait whose romanticism is sharply contrasted with the blaring propaganda stitched in by James to show the quick pivot of American media from a wartime pro-Soviet stance (clips from Michael Curtiz’s 1943 Stalin-pandering Mission to Moscow look especially unctuous) to postwar anti-Commie hysteria.

Advertisement

True to James’s penchant for picking subjects he finds worthy of not just close attention but admiration, A Compassionate Spy doesn’t expend a great deal of effort wrangling with the morality of Ted’s actions. Ted says near the end of the film that if he had known in 1944 about the true extent of Soviet crimes against humanity, he would have questioned what he was doing. He also sardonically describes his younger self as seeing the world through “pinkish” glasses. His mixing of wry asides with staunch idealism makes for a superbly engaging central figure.

Left unsaid, however, is the possibility that by speeding up the Soviet atomic weapons program out of his stated “compassion” for the Soviet people, Ted was playing just as risky a game of détente as any of the Strangelovian Pentagon war gamers were at the height of the Cold War. A Compassionate Spy’s end titles—“This film is dedicated to all those who have risked their lives for peace”—present a somewhat more simplistic view of what Ted did. The dedication’s suggestion that his actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Ted seemed to have of himself.

Score: 
 Director: Steve James  Running Time: 101 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.