A Compassionate Spy

The latest from documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life Itself, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail) tells the story of physicist Ted Hall. Recruited to join the Manhattan Project in 1943 while he was still a teenager, Hall passed key information to the Soviet Union once he learned the nature of the weapon he was enlisted to help create. Since Hall has passed on, the film is told mainly by his widow, Joan, as well as other members of his family. Ted Hall does appear, with his wife, in a previously videotaped interview, where we can see his views of his actions are complex and nuanced. While he was clearly guilty of treason, he felt justified that without the threat of mutually assured destruction, the US might have started a nuclear holocaust.

The story of The Halls is both a gripping Cold-War drama and a unique portrait of a marriage. But in order to tell this fascinating chapter in American history, James resorts to staging reenactments for the first time in his long career. A Compassionate Spy reaffirms my strong belief that if a documentary can not be told without reenactments, the director has chosen the wrong story to tell. The use of actors portraying the Halls and others during their college days and their time at Los Alamos is distracting at best and misleading at worst. Moreover, this is a story that could have been told without stooping to fictionalized performances because Joan Hall is a wonderfully engaging and opinionated storyteller. If James had relied only on his many interviews with her, perhaps the resulting film would have been shorter—maybe it would even have been a short film—but that would have been far better.

When actors are employed to illustrate the events a documentary subject is telling, they are never able to convincingly create fully embodied characters because they must share the screen with the real subjects. Even the greatest actors in the world can not compete with the real thing in the same movie. Also, the introduction of a completely different reality into a non-fiction medium, in which artificial footage is used as just another element of the established factual milieu, breaks the internal reality all films (feature or doc) must create within themselves. When a documentary is composed of actual people, photographs, and documents, adding reenactments reduces the movie into the child's game of "one of these things just doesn't belong here." Additionally, actors playing real-life individuals need time and space to bring their fictionalized take on their characters to life. This can happen in a docudrama or biopic, but in a documentary, where they are simply used to illustrate things said by real people, they never have time to convince the viewer that they are who they're playing. As an audience, we tend to just look at surface-level aspects of their performances, like how much they do or don't look like the people they're portraying, rather than what's intended, which is for us to identify more strongly with the subject in the situation being explained. But that old "show don't tell" axiom frequently undermines a film's power, regardless of its genre. A story well told is infinitely more powerful than a story poorly visualized. Thus every time James cuts away from Joan Hall his picture falls apart, which is a shame because she is a fascinating subject in her own right.