Editor’s Note: Be sure to check out our Independent Film Festival Boston coverage, from this year to past festivals.
It’s odd to think that we’re going to get a more forthrightly anti-proliferation film from Christopher Nolan later on this summer than what’s displayed in Steve James’ A Compassionate Spy, but that’s the nature of life in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Twenty-Three: Expect the unexpected. James, a master documentarian — you don’t make a movie like Hoop Dreams and somehow avoid plaudits — has never been one to shy away from tough subjects, ranging from the death penalty to the effects of the financial crisis to concussions in youth football. He is keenly attuned to the struggle of underdogs, would-be David’s beset upon them by the giant philistines of industry and government, and it makes sense, in a way, that he would seek out the story of Ted Hall, a Manhattan Project scientist, and idealist who gave information to the Soviets in order to help them make their own atomic weapons while somehow avoiding punishment. The main problem is that James descends into easy hagiography on a subject where there really are no heroes or villains, just complex and messy people who pave the road to a potential nuclear hell with their good intentions.
A gifted physicist, Hall was recruited to the project straight from Harvard as an undergraduate (he was just 18 when he headed to Los Alamos) and began to realize, as he was helping to assemble the weapon, that the Nazis weren’t going to make their own — the stated goal of the project was to beat the Germans to the atomic punch — and he wanted to prevent a single nation from having a nuclear monopoly, lest a similar evil emerges from within this nation. James oddly omits much of Hall’s spiritual background — he was a Jew, born with the name Holtzberg before his parents anglicized it to spare their sons the brunt of anti-semitism — which would have, perhaps, provided a keener insight into exactly why Hall, with the help of classmate Savvy Sax, reached out to a Soviet agent. Unlike many of his other comrades (like the Rosenbergs, whose execution casts a pallor over the middle section of Hall’s life and the film itself) Hall managed to escape any prosecution, despite FBI interrogations and constant surveillance, perhaps because his older brother, Edward, was an engineer who helped to design ICBMs for the Navy. It only emerged in the 1990s, right before he passed away, that he’d gotten away with it — at that point, being too old, irrelevant, and far away in England to be worthy of the havoc of extradition and prosecution.
Aside from James’ handsome recreations, much of the film is sourced from Hall’s interviews, some of which were public and others which were private videotape confessions made in the comfort of his own home, and the filmmaker’s extensive conversations with Hall’s wife, Joan, whom he met when he left the project and pursued graduate degrees in Chicago. Mrs. Hall is a dynamic and fun interview, with a keen sense of storytelling (she bats away jokey questions about a love triangle between her, her husband, and Sax in an eye-raising way) as well as a faithful devotion to the dearly departed. She’d known about the espionage from the beginning, shared his political beliefs, and unreservedly condones his actions. She’s the film’s loudest voice, given that Hall himself was monotone and somewhat shy, and, as a result, the documentary takes on a rose-tinted view of Hall and the era’s history. Save for Sax’s son, all of the talking heads here are Hall’s advocates in academia and elsewhere: This is the man who prevented nuclear tyranny by giving Stalin the bomb. And given that they were our allies at the time — with various propaganda pieces extolling the virtues of the Russian people — there is a strong case to be made for Hall’s decision if only preserved in the amber of that moment.
The problems begin to come in when Joan brushes off some the perception of Stalin — “some true, some not” — as the film does its best to praise Hall’s courage without examining his actions’ effects. James is clearly enamored with his subjects and, to be fair, who wouldn’t be? They are unheralded yet pivotal figures in the landscape of 20th-century history, shaped our present in unimaginable ways, and, better yet, camera-ready. Had Hall not acted, the US may have used nuclear weapons in Korea or possibly decimated the USSR, though one will never truly know, as compelling as these alternative histories are. But James’ thesis, echoed by his participants, is that the evil of nuclear weapons lies not in their very existence but rather in the fact that it was the US who built them first and used them.
This, again, is an observation to which there is no counterfactual evidence, given that we can’t exactly travel to a world in which Stalin (or for that matter, the Nazis) were the first to get the bomb. But nuclear proliferation acting as an agent of parity between nations — which is Hall’s best justification for his actions as presented here — rather than a wholesale escalation of the odds of global catastrophe, is of the same insane Cold War logic that his widow decries when it’s coming from the members of Eisenhower-dubbed “military-industrial complex.” It makes sense: a Nuclear Peace may hold in times of sanity or at the technological levels of the mid-20th century, but Hall passed before he could learn about Stanislav Petrov and his cool in the face of computer error in 1983, when the switchboard lit up and falsely suggested that the US had launched a missile strike at Russia. Had he not trusted his gut, James would have no story to tell at all, given that he and Hall and countless others — millions of innocents of all stripes, communist or capitalist, the very people he claimed to have compassion for — would have vanished in an instant.
Yet James does seem to understand, on some level, the absurdity of these claims: he ends the doc with a teary-eyed Hall begging the younger generation to work for a better world, though Hall himself never participated in activism like the Szilárd petition, which was created and signed by Manhattan Project scientists urging Truman not to drop the bomb on Japan (James even mentions the petition, mainly as a way to illustrate that dissenting voices did exist among the bomb-makers, but the petition’s fizzling out serves to bolster Hall’s claims that action was needed). This weepy clip comes before he emphasizes, in a final title card, “the nuclear nine” and their reluctance to join the UN on a treaty declaring nuclear weapons illegal. This is the first mention of any other states besides the US and USSR possessing the bomb, as well, which is another subject he happily tap-dances around in order to avoid any mention of the consequences of Hall’s actions.
I can empathize with the urge to paint Hall in a purely sympathetic light, given that he remained strongly committed to his ideals, managed to outrun the judgment of his era, and is viewed by a decent amount of knowledgeable folks as an evil traitor. But the lack of any sort of pushback — even a mild interrogation of his ethics is absent (the opposition takes on a single form, in which a vet rues that they didn’t shoot him) — is bizarre and irresponsible, eschewing complexity as if it were somehow invalidating. Again, we don’t know what the 20th century would look like without his involvement, but we have a good understanding of the possible futures that still await us with the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the globe. If disinformation and climate change can move the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” a full ten seconds closer to annihilation, Hall’s contributions to our present, grounded in compassion or not, help to keep it ticking.