By Matthew Moorcroft

Solid Recommendation

• Directed by Steve James
• Not Rated

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

In 1994, Steve James released Hoop Dreams, a 3 hour long documentary that, on the surface, was about two high school student who wanted to become all star basketball players. In reality though, the documentary was really about social class, inequality, a broken education system, and life as a black teenager in America, using basketball as a jumping off point for those kinds of topics rather then dedicating it to simply just that. James has since become one of the most prolific and acclaimed documentarians of our time, with new releases from him being something of an event.

His newest, A Compassionate Spy, couldn’t have come at a better time. For starters, it comes out on the heels of Christopher Nolan’s own Oppenheimer, a film that deals with the exact same subject matter – the creation of the atomic bomb – and similar themes. Secondly, and more importantly, it finds Steve James trying to tap into similar territory as Hoop Dreams, using the story of Theodore Hall as a jumping off point for greater ideas about America, the Cold War, communism, the Red scare, and atomic power.

And it’s not like Theodore Hall’s story isn’t worth telling; the fascinating man who purposely leaked secrets about the Manhattan project to Russia out of a fear that the US’s monopoly on atomic power would end in disaster is the kind of thing that would make for any good documentary or even narrative feature. James’ approach then, one mostly of a single conversation interspersed with live action reenactments, newspaper clippings, and other shorter interviews is sort of odd. It keeps the viewer at an arm’s length, feeling more like an observer then straight up involved in the process like a lot of James’ other work.

It could simply be the subject matter, though. Hall being a known communist for some is probably a difficult pill to swallow, and the framing of his actions as neutral as possible lets the audience decide on whether or not he was in the right. James clearly has his opinions (as do I) but there is an ambiguity here that’s really appreciated. It’s perspective is simply that of showing you the facts of what happened, plain and simple, and without judgement, giving you as a receptor to said facts the means to make their own decisions on the subject.

It’s just kind of a shame the actual presentation is mildly weak at points. The reenactments, while they work for reasons I mentioned before, do feel cheap in a way not a lot of James’ work has felt before, and ultimately are a little unnecessary. I get the lack of footage for events like this but part of the beauty of the narration is how vividly it’s already described, so it being there feels more like Steve James’ being unconfident in the material.

And yeah, I do think there is reason to believe that an unconfidence is warranted a bit. After the whole spy stuff and everything with the Red Scare and the FBI investigations, Hall’s life was relatively uneventful, which means it tapers out pretty quickly by the end. The real treat of it actually ends up being the relationship between him and his wife, which is a great little piece of real life romance that warms your heart. With that being the real heart of the story, it’s good that James doubles down on that the further it goes, leaving much of the back third of the film dedicated to his family life and his devotion to his wife.

I think A Compassionate Spy is unfournately a little weak among Steve James efforts, but it’s still a compelling story across the board from a documentarian who can do this kind of thing in his sleep. This could have definitely used a tighter focus and maybe slow down on the fictional versions of things a bit but other then that, this works as a strange sort of companion piece to Oppenheimer that I highly urge anybody interested in that time period check out.