‘A Compassionate Spy’ Review: Back to the usS.R.

The topic of the absorbing documentary “A Compassionate Spy” is perhaps the good atomic physicist Theodore Alvin Hall, however its star is his nonagenarian widow, Joan. Funny, candid and desirous to share, this pleasant girl — and her unwavering assist for her husband’s espionage throughout World War II — units the tone for a movie that leaves little question as to the situation of its sympathies.

These will come as no shock to anybody aware of the work of the movie’s author and director, Steve James, whose empathy for his topics has all the time been evident. And by inserting Hall’s leaking of nuclear secrets and techniques to the Soviets inside the context of the couple’s romantic and sturdy marriage, James gently wraps the viewer within the heat of Joan’s reminiscences. The impact is sneakily disarming.

“I felt so proud of him,” she confesses to James throughout one in every of a number of interviews. “Ted was trying to prevent a holocaust.” Recruited by the Manhattan Project in 1944 on the age of 18, Hall was the youngest scientist engaged on the event of an atomic bomb and desirous to win a race towards the Nazis. Later, fearing the results of a single nation’s monopoly on such a horrible weapon, he determined (with the assistance and encouragement of his finest pal, the poet Saville Sax) to cross categorised nuclear particulars to the Soviet Union. Despite being subjected to F.B.I. interrogations and many years of surveillance, Hall was by no means prosecuted, his spying hid from the general public till just a few years earlier than his dying in 1999.

Ensconced in her cozy residence outdoors Cambridge, England, Joan (who died final month) is an entertaining booster of her husband’s legacy. Recalling her shut postwar friendship with Hall and Sax on the University of Chicago (in nostalgic re-enactments, we see the threesome gamboling on the grass like well-fed puppies), she cheekily hints at a youthful love triangle and divulges that Hall confessed his spying earlier than their marriage. She was unfazed.

Hall’s personal emotions in regards to the espionage — expressed in clips from numerous interviews, together with the 1998 docuseries “Cold War” and excerpts from a VHS tape belonging to Joan — would develop extra nuanced. (The movie’s title comes from his citing of compassion as a “major factor” in his resolution to leak.) Strangely, he admits no concern for his personal security, and even needed to be dissuaded from making an attempt to forestall the 1953 executions of the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Noting America’s political about-face from pro-Russian propaganda (like Michael Curtiz’s 1943 film “Mission to Moscow”) to Red-scare paranoia, James retains his digital camera calm and the speaking heads to a minimal. The dramatizations are properly filmed, if a bit of hokey, and the general velvety tone is peppered with piquant particulars, like Hall speaking with the Russians in a code derived from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

Wry, shy and fragile-looking, Hall will get off calmly right here, with little interrogation of his patriotism, private ethics or fears of a nuclear world’s potential for catastrophic error. (He candidly describes engaged on the bomb as “exhilarating.”) The common impression given by this heat, low-key movie is that the spying was a easy act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anybody in search of extra vigorous pushback should look elsewhere.

A Compassionate Spy
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.