Rating: NR | Runtime: 101 minutes
Release Date: August 4th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Director(s): Steve James

There’s something I have to tell you.

You can’t know the weight of Ted Hall’s decision, as a nineteen-year-old “wunderkind” working on the Manhattan Project, to give the Soviets secrets that would allow them to keep up with America in the nuclear arms race without finding yourself in a similar situation. Other people were there by his side, hooting and hollering when the test bomb succeeded in the New Mexican desert—a reaction that ultimately helped push him to do what he did. Should he have been executed for it like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? Should they have been executed? Such moral quandaries will never cease to haunt our species.

What really stands out about Hall throughout Steve James’ documentary A Compassionate Spy is that, while his participation in building the bomb that wiped out hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens did haunt him, he never regretted his choice to mitigate the potential of America becoming the next Nazi Germany with bankers and industrialists taking over the government for capitalistic motives. With first-hand accounts courtesy of interviews conducted shortly before his death in 1999 proving so, he’d do it all again.

There is necessary context to that reality, though. Hindsight did give him pause once he discovered just how brutal Joseph Stalin was, but he didn’t know that when he passed along his nuclear secrets. So, it goes back to my initial declaration that you cannot know what you cannot know. He cannot know if he would have changed his mind with that information unless he had that information. Maybe the prospect of giving a monster like Stalin this power would have still paled in comparison to his desperate need to ensure the world didn’t succumb to the power it would have birthed by allowing one nation to hold everyone’s fate in its hands.

While the film touches on these internal philosophical debates, it isn’t exactly about what Ted Hall did as much as who Ted Hall was. Don’t therefore come into the experience of watching it with the expectation that it’s solely about the process, deliberation, and aftermath of his being a Russian spy. This is instead more a biopic of the man himself and the life born out of his treasonous act of defiance. And more than that, it’s a love letter to him as told by his widow Joan—the woman he married shortly after his return from Los Alamos and who kept his secret from the moment he admitted it directly after proposing.

As such, this is hardly an objective piece. Including Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, authors of the book Bombshell: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy, surely helps in that regard, but they’re here to provide anecdotal information and corroboration. It’s Joan who leads the narrative and, while all evidence seems to agree, you cannot ignore she does so through a filter of love wherein he could do no wrong.

You cannot blame James from taking this angle considering the subject matter, though. Just as Hall made his decision with compassion for mankind’s preservation held above blind loyalty to his country, this version of his story centers compassion for Ted above the scorched earth vitriol of a military establishment indoctrinated to see everything as black or white. And if you must choose between the conjecture of someone who spent her life by his side or that of an institution hellbent on insulating itself (James does well to show just how quickly the media and government pivoted from Russia being an ally to anti-“Red” propaganda), the former is the way to go.

This is especially true because Joan is a passionate and entertaining storyteller. She has a wonderful sense of humor and an immovable sense of political and moral responsibility. The film unsurprisingly works best when she’s given the reins (or when archival snippets of Ted speaking for himself are shown), but the many dramatic reenactments filling the gaps aren’t without their charm even if they often render the whole a bit too sanitized and plastic for the trouble.

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Ted Hall and Joan Hall in A COMPASSIONATE SPY, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.