Guy Lodge Film Critic Just before director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “Oppenheimer” plants a fixed image of Ted Hall in the popular imagination, along comes Steve James’s sensitive, studious documentary “A Compassionate Spy” to preemptively set any records straight.
Unpacking the life and work of the prodigious teenage Manhattan Project physicist who passed key information about the endeavor to the Soviet Union — cuing an adulthood dogged by suspicion and secrecy — the film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling.
If the filmmaking is more televisual than in James’s best work, with its flourishes limited to some unnecessary dramatized passages, that should be no impediment to “A Compassionate Spy” commanding a sizable audience on multiple platforms. “It would be nice to be proud, but I’m not a proud person,” says the septuagenarian Hall, in interview footage captured not long before his death in 1999.
It’s a statement typical of the scientist’s soft-spoken humility, though half a century on from the most historically consequential work of his career, the mere suggestion of pride in his actions is boldly defiant.
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