A Compassionate Spy concerns itself with the emotional aftermath of an 18-year-old Los Alamos physicist who leaked atomic secrets to the Soviets, though those with Oppenheimer fever may want to look elsewhere. JacobOller's review:
crushes its subject under the weight of so many sins, that details which merit stories of their own simply become pebbles adding to the fission bomb’s boulder. One such detail is that of Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project. His actions—emblematic of a debate between left-leaning Los Alamos scientists wary of an American nuclear monopoly and a U.S. government eager to flex that superiority—feed into concerns about J.
Despite its sensational premise, James’ documentary can be quiet, sweet and as eloquent as its main source of information, Joan. She’s clear-eyed and sharp, discussing her dedication to progressive politics and reciting her own poems about her husband’s death. Her recollections about keeping Hall’s secret are never as riveting as they are warm, simply indicative of two people who shared a love partially founded on ideals that their country deemed criminal.
The amateurish dramatizations feel most like undermining filler when juxtaposed with some of the shockingly hawkish archival material James and his team unearth. Newspaper headlines clamor for more dead Japanese civilians or for the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The twangy “Atomic Power” by the Buchanan Brothers plays over nauseating photos of human bodies, warped by the bomb into surreal carnage.
This choice is all the more confounding when we see the real Hall, most affecting in a lengthy CNN interview, unapologetic yet emotional. He isn’t self-righteous, but adamant that his actions helped prevent more evil from occurring. Joan, his children, and the children of Halls’ collaborator Saville Sax have embraced this legacy similarly. But it is the ever-evolving radical spirit found in Joan, whose Communist sympathies evolved to encompass the feminist movement and more, that is’s soul.
messily work its way to this conclusion. Other threads, possible pathways that aren’t followed , drop out over time. Even the premise, of a teenage spy who helped establish our global nuclear standoff, is only peered at from a distance. James’ film, with its aesthetic focus on nature and household pleasures, seems to wish that it wasn’t associated with anything as mythic as the bomb.
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