A Compassionate Spy review – story of a Manhattan Project scientist offers disturbing insights

With the much-anticipated Oppenheimer due out this summer, Steve James’s (of Hoop Dreams fame) new documentary A Compassionate Spy plays almost like a non-fiction appetiser for Nolan’s incoming epic as it focuses in on one scientist on the Manhattan Project and the moral crisis he carried his entire life.

This scientist is Ted Hall, recruited to the Project straight from his Harvard studies when he was just 17, becoming an especially integral part of the development of the implosion bomb before eventually handing over US atomic secrets to the Soviet Union at the close of World War II.

We are guided through Ted’s life and decision-making mostly through interviews with his widow Joan, a gifted academic in her own right, the philosopher and poet to Ted’s rational scientist. Joan is a fascinating figure and a great storyteller, very enjoyable company as she discusses her and Ted’s courtship and the decades-long battle they faced to keep the FBI off their family’s back.

Less successful than these interviews are the re-enactment sequences that James keeps insisting upon, which are meant to further illuminate the lives of Ted and Joan but are instead just really cheesy, pulled off with minimal panache while telling you nothing that Joan’s voiceover hasn’t already covered. Through both her interviews and archive footage of Ted, the couple makes it very clear why Ted found he had the moral imperative to leak information to the Soviets – though he doesn’t call it as such, he essentially predicted the necessity of Mutually Assured Destruction to avoid a nuclear holocaust.

It’s in examining this moral imperative that A Compassionate Spy is at its strongest, using archive footage and bizarre post-war propaganda songs that would feel right at home in an Adam Curtis documentary. James is both fascinated and disgusted by the barbaric excitement, even arousal, that the American media and public had at the idea of atomically annihilating their foes, and these feelings are contagious.

As a story of a couple, A Compassionate Spy can feel a little over-stretched, and you might find yourself checking your watch during the last 20 minutes, but as an examination of the post-war American psyche, it’s an insightful, disturbing, and genuinely novel slice of history.

A Compassionate Spy is released in UK cinemas on 24 September.