Theodore Hall was an 18-year-old Harvard senior when, in 1944, he was recruited to join the Manhattan Project. As a member of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s team, he studied the physical properties of Uranium-235, the material used for the first atomic bomb (“Little Boy”) that was dropped on Hiroshima, and worked on the implosion bomb (“Fat Man”) used against Nagasaki. He was, by all accounts, an immensely talented physicist. As was revealed decades later, he was also a traitor, having passed designs and information from Los Alamos to the Soviet Union along with his longtime friend Saville Sax. Despite the government’s suspicions, it was a secret known by only a few (most notably, his wife Joan), and one that he maintained until the late 1990s, when it became public knowledge shortly before his 1999 death.
With Oppenheimer currently flourishing at the box office, A Compassionate Spy (Aug. 4, in theaters), Steve James’ documentary portrait of Hall, arrives at a fortuitous cinematic moment, and its links with that blockbuster extend to the fact that its subject was a communist who came to have grave regrets about the weapon he’d helped create. Unfortunately, whereas Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece paints a complicated portrait of its protagonist and the Manhattan Project, A Compassionate Spy takes a far more rose-tinted, one-note view of Hall—a tack that requires skirting past major conflicting particulars and eschewing the very uncertainty that Hall himself exhibits in numerous archival interviews.
Hoops Dreams director James’ documentary shares many parallels with Nolan’s film, as both concern genius physicists whose communist sympathies (and, in Hall’s case, party affiliation) colored their reactions to their A-bomb achievement and got them into post-WWII trouble with the powers that be. In Hall’s case, however, those problems were largely self-instigated, given that he and Sax willingly plotted—through coded letters about Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—to deliver America’s classified nuclear know-how to the Soviets. When asked during a 1999 CNN/BBC chat, Hall summed up his reason for doing so thusly: “I guess a major factor would be compassion.”
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A Compassionate Spy is largely guided by 2019 interviews with Hall’s wife Joan, whom he met at the University of Chicago and remained fiercely loyal to until his death, and it functions in no uncertain terms as a reputation rehabilitation project. Joan and director James envision Hall as a man of noble conscience, if not a heroic proto-Edward Snowden whistleblower. According to the film, his reservations about keeping the Soviets out of the atomic-bomb loop were shared by many colleagues. Moreover, he and Sax (and Joan, apparently even today) believed in the greatness of the Soviet Union, held a far less flowery opinion about America, and feared that a United States apocalyptic-power monopoly would result in atomic war against the Soviets—a notion that A Compassionate Spy presents as a near inevitability, with America eager to bomb the Soviets to smithereens to preclude them from conquering Europe.
Such suppositions require far more evidence than the meager tidbits provided here, but they fit comfortably into James’ non-fiction argument that Hall’s espionage helped prevent America from perpetrating genocide. Joan isn’t shy about her socialist activism and adoration of the valiant and commendable Soviets; she even talks about teaching Russian in later life out of a feeling of kinship with her Russian ancestors. And A Compassionate Spy convincingly contends that Hall thought he was doing right by the world with his actions, creating a mutually-assured-destruction détente that would avert future global wars. Yet the man who materializes in the film is less a zealot than a soft-spoken, haunted, paradoxical individual who found the “Trinity” test “exhilarating” but was horrified by his colleagues’ celebrations, and who allegedly didn’t lie and yet perpetrated one of the biggest deceptions in his nation’s history.
To its detriment, A Compassionate Spy has little interest in a multifaceted portrait of Hall. In large part, this is due to its focus on Joan, who expresses admiration for Russia (and, via her youngest daughter, Maoist China), a romantic yearning to flee to that country, and a bitter disgust for America and the “bastards” who dared censure Hall once his secret became public. James takes his cue from Joan, or simply shares it, and slants everything. Stalinist atrocities and antagonism are paid fleeting lip service; about the 1968 USSR invasion of Czechoslovakia, Joan merely quips, “These things were really traumatic.” Meanwhile, the United States is cast as modern civilization’s biggest threat, all military-industrial warmongering and Red Scare-driven intolerance—such that the FBI’s questioning of Hall is treated as unjust persecution, and James (in his closing dedication) defines Hall as a man who risked his life for peace.
The problem isn’t that elements of A Compassionate Spy aren’t true; it’s that the documentary so heavily tips in one direction (and conceals any facts that muddy or refute its perspective) that it prioritizes simplistic agenda over complex truth. Much better is when James intermittently shifts his attention to Sax’s son Boria and daughter Sarah, who discuss their tortured feelings (shame, anger, devotion) about their father and his role in this scheme, as well as Sax’s own attitude toward it, considering that he viewed passing intel to the Russians as his greatest accomplishment, and yet one figuratively stolen by Hall. In these brief interludes, Sax comes across as a fascinatingly contradictory figure, not unlike Hall’s brother Ed, who ostensibly never criticized his sibling even though he himself was a central figure in developing anti-ballistic missiles (a sticky situation that probably kept J. Edgar Hoover from going after Hall).
A Compassionate Spy primarily cares about lionizing Hall as a clear-sighted patriot who suffered unfairly for his courageous act of espionage. James is shrewd to detail Hall’s (and Joan’s) political convictions and reasoning—and moral calculus—during the 1940s and ’50s, as well as to capture the socialist-left climate in which he and many other intellectuals of the era existed. Yet while Joan discusses how fervently she wanted Hall to maintain his secret (because she understood the potential Rosenbergs-like consequences of being found out), James never suitably questions whether the couple might have actually been wrong. Consequently, the film is an example of a thesis supported only by cherry-picked evidence.
