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The film hasn’t changed. But the context certainly has.
The latest Steve James documentary “A Compassionate Spy,” opening Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center, made its world premiere late last summer at the Venice Film Festival.
What has happened since then? “Oppenheimer.” In the context of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster, James’ flawed, absorbing examination of physicist Theodore Hall, at 18 the youngest member of the Manhattan Project, now plays differently, more urgently, than it did a year ago.
Maybe I simply needed a second look at “A Compassionate Spy” to sort through more of what the filmmaker behind “Abacus,” “Life Itself,” “Hoop Dreams” and so many more excellent nonfiction works was trying to achieve here. His film, a full, occasionally unresolved 100 minutes or so, works with a discreetly freewheeling mixture of fresh interview footage, primarily with Hall’s widow, Joan Hall; dramatic reenactments, using actors, of the Halls’ college-age courtship years at the University of Chicago after World War II; archival material ranging from jingoistic popular songs to excerpts from the 1943 pro-Soviet Hollywood adaptation of “Mission to Moscow”; and other elements.
Seeing “A Compassionate Spy” in the context of “Oppenheimer,” James’ film serves as a fascinating complement — and in some ways, a corrective — to the Nolan blockbuster, which leaves the Hall affair out of things entirely.
In 1944, in collaboration with longtime friend and fellow Communist Saville Sax and working through Soviet operatives, Hall fed crucial information to the Soviets regarding the Manhattan Project’s development of the implosion bomb. A year earlier, recruited out of Harvard University for Oppenheimer’s secret atomic project, teenaged Hall felt enormous moral qualms about the apparent, and then proven, military purpose for the bomb.
He wasn’t alone. He felt the Soviets should be privy to the technical knowledge, to keep the world from U.S. dominance, and possible nuclear catastrophe. Post-WWII, with the FBI lurking, for years, in the corners of their lives, the Halls kept quiet during the worst of the Red Menace era. The execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg came and went; meantime, according to “Bombshell” co-author Joseph Albright (interviewed here), “the Rosenbergs were small fish compared to Ted Hall.”
Much of the documentary draws from on-camera interviews Hall agreed to in 1998, the year before he died. The freshest material in “A Compassionate Spy” comes from James’ 2019 interviews with Joan Hall, and members of her family, along with separate interviews with the children of Hall’s longtime friend Sax.
The dramatic reenactments are not this movie’s strong suit. Even with some striking work from Lucy Zukaitis as young Joan, the UChicago scenes, along with imagined scenes of young Hall at Los Alamos, land in an uncertain stylistic area —partly scripted dialogue, possibly improvised, somewhat stilted either way. It’s something new, at least to this degree, for director James, and it’s best taken here as a trial run for the future.
What’s effective and touching in “A Compassionate Spy” relates directly to the satisfaction of getting to know Joan Hall, a terrifically vital and reflective presence. We get, among other things, a glimpse of a long-lived marriage hounded by secrets and surveillance, but an abiding mutual trust. And like “Oppenheimer,” James’ film ends with a sobering warning about the cost, and the probable endgame, of an eternal nuclear arms race being run by more and more nations. Was Oppenheimer right in hoping, against all reasonable political hope, that sharing atomic developments with allies and enemies might’ve rerouted our planet’s narrative? Was Hall, acting on his political beliefs as well as his conscience, right, too?
“A Compassionate Spy” — 3 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (some language and horrific imagery)
Running time: 1:41
How to watch: Aug. 4-17 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; www.siskelfilmcenter.org. Also streaming on Apple TV Plus, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube and other platforms.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune