The rapidly improving fiscal situation has nonetheless opened the door to a wide-ranging consideration of policy and political priorities as the glow of prosperity is beginning to alter the way official Washington is addressing the nation's long-term problems.

Mr. Frayn turns the encounter among the men and Bohr's wife, Margrethe (Blair Brown), into a wide-ranging, intensely emotional consideration of everything from quantum mechanics to the loss of a child, from the fate of the world in the atomic age to the nature of friendship.

The scientific project is advanced by broad and wide-ranging consideration of a multitude of hypotheses, for those that are incorrect will eventually be shown to be so, and that in itself is an advance.