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9 August 2023

‘A Compassionate Spy’: Footnote to ‘Oppenheimer’

Michael O'Sullivan

Physicist Ted Hall, who was recruited to join the Manhattan Project after graduating from Harvard at the age of 18, worked alongside J. Robert Oppenheimer at the project’s Los Alamos compound. Although his character is not depicted in “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s sweeping biopic about the director of the Los Alamos lab, Hall’s smaller story — told in the documentary “A Compassionate Spy” — makes for a timely footnote to Nolan’s magnum opus.

As Hall has admitted, shortly before his death in 1999, he gave the Soviets critical information about the implosion technology being used for the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, information that may have helped them in the pursuit of their own nuclear weapon. The decision, he says in an old interview — footage of which, included here, contains his confession and other recollections of the past — was born out of “compassion”: Two superpowers with the same weapon of mass destruction would be less likely to use it against each other.

Suspicions about the loyalty of Oppenheimer — who like Hall and some others at Los Alamos had some sympathies toward leftist causes — figure prominently in “Oppenheimer.” But although Hall was interviewed by the FBI, he was never charged with a crime. By the time the U.S. government’s suspicions about Hall were confirmed (when a misspelled version of his name was recognized in an intercepted communication from Russia), the decision was made not to pursue espionage charges, which would have publicly revealed that the United States had broken Soviet code.

This small detail is actually the most fascinating part of “A Compassionate Spy,” but it is glossed over in the film by Steve James, director of the Oscar-nominated 1994 film “Hoop Dreams.” Instead, the film focuses mainly on an interview with Hall’s widow, Joan Hall, who adds some interesting perspective and insight into her husband’s thinking. Reenactments with actors playing the Halls (J. Michael Wright and Lucy Zukaitis) and Ted’s friend and co-conspirator Saville Sax (Nicolas Eastlund) are occasionally goofy and unnecessary. The threesome, it is suggested, formed a love triangle, so “A Compassionate Spy” is also a kind of romance.

Ted’s motivations are adequately defended, by his own words and Joan’s. But the other side of the moral coin is left largely unexplored, other than a brief clip in which we hear one of the film’s subjects opine that, if he had his druthers, Ted would have been shot as a traitor. Interludes related to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage in 1951 (and executed in 1953), provide some helpful context.

“A Compassionate Spy” is less a full companion piece to “Oppenheimer” than an intriguing sidebar. When Ted Hall reminisces about how he sat alone in his room, disturbed, as his Los Alamos colleagues celebrated their team’s 1945 success, it’s hard not to remember those scenes of self-congratulation in “Oppenheimer” — but also to recall Nolan’s film as a better, bigger, bolder and more complex examination of all the nuance and contradiction associated with the dawn of the atomic age.

Unrated. Available on Apple TV Plus, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube and other streaming platforms; also playing Aug. 3, 10 and 24 at Cafritz Hall of the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C. Contains brief strong language and some disturbing images of radiation burns. 101 minutes.

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