An uncharacteristically shallow effort from the great documentary filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams), A Compassionate Spy is half devoted to telling a crucial and relevant tale of espionage against a backdrop of a contentious war effort. The other, far more significantly represented portion reveals that narrative as the backdrop of a steadfast marriage that went beyond the call of duty. In light of a recent big-budget blockbuster about what happened in Los Alamos, it’s especially curious to unlock why this documentary simply doesn’t work, either in terms of how James has utilized access and how meticulously he has shaped the final result.
The subject implied by the title is clearly the most interesting aspect of his own story. Theodore “Ted” Hall was an American physicist, hired by Leslie Groves, a Lieutenant General of the Army Corps of Engineers and the director of the Manhattan Project, to work on the development of the atomic bomb. He was deeply involved in the project until the autumn of 1944, when it became clear to most that Germany was in a losing position at the end of the Second World War. At that time, Hall became a spy for the Soviet Union, passing nuclear secrets on to the contacts he had made in Russia, naively believing that an equal footing between the countries might lead to a nuclear stalemate.
This is all fascinating stuff, and the archived interviews featuring Hall before his death in November 1999 are urgently important souvenirs of this tense and terrifying period of military history. Hall is a generous subject, especially because he and his wife Joan were smart to talk about his espionage activities shortly before his death. What is far less compelling, frankly, are the broad, biographical facts of Ted and Joan’s marriage, which was clearly tested by his governmental and covert activities. Nevertheless, Joan is present and accounted for here, recapping their lives in a straightforward, no-nonsense fashion, except that their lives interrupt the grander story on display.
This is the first grave error in James’ judgment. The other is to slide rather aimlessly between the different points of this story without any regard for its construction. James has always relished the opportunity to focus on the personal and interpersonal elements of a story in his documentaries, but that approach in the case of this film merely dilutes its impact and steers its focus away from the person at its center. Thus a disproportionate amount of what we see is the series of interviews with Joan, whose only real contribution to her husband’s story is to tell us how she felt about it all. Eventually, we get a redundant portrait of a man via a third party, instead of a real sense of him through his own words.
That may not entirely be James’ fault, of course, since Ted Hall died nearly a quarter of a century ago, but it does call into question the necessity of telling the story in this way. A Compassionate Spy is a repetitive document as a result of this fatal decision to split the perspectives of its subjects.
Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
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