AllMovie

Adapted from the Tony award-winning play by Michael Frayn, Copenhagen is set in the titular Denmark capitol in the year 1941. According to existing records, it was in that city and year that German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor Neils Bohr met together on the brink of WWII. It will never be known what these two men, so politically divergent yet so much alike in their scientific goals, discussed during that fateful meeting (several attempts to reconstruct their conversation from memory proved both futile and bitterly divisive), though it is a matter of record that both men had discovered the methodology for splitting the atom -- which, of course, was the foundation for the atomic bomb. Frayn's play offers a fanciful yet utterly believable and incredibly witty and charming speculation on the words that might have passed between the idealistic Bohr (played by Stephen Rea) and the pragmatic Heisenberg (Daniel Craig) -- as recalled decades later by the principal characters from the vantage point of the Afterlife. Co-produced by Britain's BBC and U.S. public-TV outlet KCET, Copenhagen was first broadcast as an episode of the PBS Hollywood Presents anthology.