Unwieldy Documentary A Compassionate Spy Finds Humanity in the Bomb’s Shadow

The pile-up of anxieties that is Christopher Nolan’s inspired biopic Oppenheimer crushes its subject under the weight of so many sins, that details which merit stories of their own simply become pebbles adding to the fission bomb’s boulder. One such detail is that of Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project. His actions—emblematic of a debate between left-leaning Los Alamos scientists wary of an American nuclear monopoly and a U.S. government eager to flex that superiority—feed into concerns about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s capabilities as a leader, his political views, and the mitigation efforts made by those that invented armageddon. The establishment of the “balance of terror,” where superpowers maintain a relative peace through mutually assured destruction, is just one more body blow to a staggering man, filled with regrets. But Fuchs wasn’t alone in hastening that bitter balance. Ted Hall, the youngest physicist working in Los Alamos, also leaked secrets to the Soviets. He just got away with it. Steve James’ thin documentary A Compassionate Spy touches on his evasion of the FBI but, much like Oppenheimer, is more concerned with the emotional aftermath of a world-altering choice.

A Compassionate Spy is not a thrilling recollection of treason. It has little to say about the actual espionage that Hall pulled off when he was an 18-year-old Harvard grad working on the Manhattan Project. It’s far more focused, refreshingly at first, on telling a domestic story, one of happiness forged despite the best efforts of the U.S. government, told by Hall’s widow, Joan. Joan met Hall at the University of Chicago after he returned from Los Alamos (and after he’d already shared the design of the Fat Man bomb with the Soviet Union, unknowingly corroborating fellow physicist-spy Fuchs). He told her his secret the same day he asked her to marry him. A Compassionate Spy, therefore, becomes less a story of spycraft and science, and more an autobiography of a marriage entwined with leftist politics and a constant defiance of America’s nuclear plans.

Despite its sensational premise, James’ documentary can be quiet, sweet and as eloquent as its main source of information, Joan. She’s clear-eyed and sharp, discussing her dedication to progressive politics and reciting her own poems about her husband’s death. Her recollections about keeping Hall’s secret are never as riveting as they are warm, simply indicative of two people who shared a love partially founded on ideals that their country deemed criminal. 

But A Compassionate Spy can also be overly enamored with its charming subjects, listening to repetitive anecdotes with rapt attention and giving the most dull details (driving down a lane and thinking quietly) dramatic reenactments. These romanticized scenes, mostly set in James’ recognizable home base of Chicago, are boring in conception and ridiculous in execution. Stiffly acted with laughably broad dialogue and lit like a glowing, sketch-troupe version of Old Hollywood, these silly sepia memories seem present only to extend the doc’s 100-minute runtime.

The amateurish dramatizations feel most like undermining filler when juxtaposed with some of the shockingly hawkish archival material James and his team unearth. Newspaper headlines clamor for more dead Japanese civilians or for the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  The twangy “Atomic Power” by the Buchanan Brothers (sample lyric: “Hiroshima, Nagasaki paid a big price for their sins / When scorched from the face of earth their battles could not win”) plays over nauseating photos of human bodies, warped by the bomb into surreal carnage. Mission to Moscow, directed by Casablanca‘s Michael Curtiz, kisses Stalin’s boots only a few years before the propaganda floored it in the other direction. We quickly shrug off these wrenching historical details when a couple local actors clunkily mull over the dangers of talking to the U.S.S.R., cheapening Hall’s actions and the consequences he hoped to mitigate. Fighting heavy-handed bloodlust with heavy-handed morality makes for a slow, unsatisfying bout.

This choice is all the more confounding when we see the real Hall, most affecting in a lengthy CNN interview, unapologetic yet emotional. He isn’t self-righteous, but adamant that his actions helped prevent more evil from occurring. Joan, his children, and the children of Halls’ collaborator Saville Sax have embraced this legacy similarly. But it is the ever-evolving radical spirit found in Joan, whose Communist sympathies evolved to encompass the feminist movement and more, that is A Compassionate Spy’s soul. It’s no wonder James finds himself unable to look away from Joan’s life story, because her defiant pride and unextinguished love glow more brightly than abstract geopolitics ever could. In pitting her personality against the failures of the U.S. (and those of the Soviets, despite the left’s hope at the time), James’ own values shine through. The historical relevance is only a launchpad for this cinematic statement of ethics, where the best weapon against institutional evil is the steady, lifelong, personal pursuit of good.

The idea is admirable and Joan Hall is certainly a winning subject, but you can see A Compassionate Spy messily work its way to this conclusion. Other threads, possible pathways that aren’t followed (like that of Sax’s inferiority complex, or of the Rosenberg trial’s larger place in history), drop out over time. Even the premise, of a teenage spy who helped establish our global nuclear standoff, is only peered at from a distance. James’ film, with its aesthetic focus on nature and household pleasures, seems to wish that it wasn’t associated with anything as mythic as the bomb. But it is inescapable, even if A Compassionate Spy only focuses on the humanity to be found in its shadow.

Director: Steve James
Release Date: August 4, 2023

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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