VENICE, Italy — “This is kind of like: whoa.”
And that’s Chicago documentary filmmaker Steve James’ deadpan monosyllable response when asked about seeing his latest nonfiction project, “A Compassionate Spy,” on the big screen at the 1,032-seat Sala Grande in his first-ever Venice Film Festival world premiere.
For this filmmaker, “A Compassionate Spy” is different, too. James’ subjects, one gone since 1999, the other very much with us, are Ted and Joan Hall. Ted Hall was the youngest scientist recruited to work with physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was still a teenager and, like many of his colleagues, left-leaning and increasingly uneasy and conflicted about the weapon they were about to drop on the course of history.
“This feels like a grander stage than the Sundance Film Festival,” he told me. Most of James’ nonfiction work has made its debut there, at the mainstay Park City, Utah, festival held in January. “It’s great at Sundance. Never gets old. But this is different.”
Barely out of his teens, Hall became a spy for the Soviet Union, America’s ally at the time. He fed Soviet agents information on the implosion bomb he’d been working on and for decades, along with his wife, in America and then in Cambridge, England, eluded FBI suspicions and public scorn.
His was a rich and unsettling riddle of conscience. Did the Halls act honorably? Was the espionage treasonous, or worse? Or was his subversive action ultimately for the greater good of humankind?
Last week, James said the Venice world premiere schedule meant seeing zero movies other than his own, and then departing more or less immediately for Grand Junction, Colorado. On Facebook “A Compassionate Spy” producer Mark Mitten, one of several on the production team traveling with James, posted Sunday: “We left Venice at 4 a.m. and arrived in Telluride for a 10 p.m. screening.”
This film, James told me before the Venice premiere, represented new challenges because “it’s historical, more archivally driven, though it’s also interview-driven with Joan, whom I adore. She’s the reason I wanted to make the film.” He spent three days with Joan Hall in 2019. That footage, coupled with access to audiotaped interviews with Ted Hall from the late 1990s, convinced James he had a movie.
This is the first time James has augmented a nonfiction work with re-creations, using actors to play young Ted and Joan and their close friend Saville Sax, in their post-WWII years at the University of Chicago. “Early on I decided I wanted re-creations,” he told me. “It seemed like the only way to bring it to life. And I was excited about the idea. I’d never done that with a doc before. And I don’t want to keep doing the same things the same way, over and over.”
The critical response at Venice has been interestingly divided. Indiewire critic David Ehrlich called “A Compassionate Spy” a “minor addition to one of documentary cinema’s great bodies of work,” assessing the reenactments as “a miscalculation that keeps (the film) at arm’s length.” A couple of days later, reviewing the Telluride U.S. premiere for rogerebert.com, correspondent Tomris Laffly had similar resistance to the reenactments.
But she added: “Little by little, we get a complete sense of the man Hall was — someone so ahead of his years with his sophisticated politics and humanism that he couldn’t participate in the cheery celebrations of his colleagues after they successfully detonated an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert as a test.”
For Variety, Guy Lodge described the film as a “sensitive, studious documentary … emotionally nuanced … if the filmmaking is more televisual than in James’ 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.”
The critics will have their say. But the experience of opening at Venice, and then diving straight into Telluride? Whoa. “It’s like Omar says in ‘The Wire,’” James said. “I’m in the game.”
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(Tribune critic Michael Phillips is a panelist for the 2022 Venice Film Festival’s Biennale College Cinema program, separate from the main competition slate. Travel expenses were paid for by Biennale College Cinema.)
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