Children notice everything that their parents do, especially when their parents are misbehaving.  Parents tell their children not to swear, only to do it themselves.  They smoke, drink and do drugs even after warning their kids of the dangers of those things.  Every instance where a parent exhibits bad judgment or is hypocritical, a child is there to bear witness.  Children don’t understand everything they see, and certain behaviors are mysterious without the life experience to process them.  Sometimes their underlying meaning becomes clear later in life.  Until that time arrives, however, all we are left with is puzzling memories that we know are significant but don’t know why.

In retrospect, Christopher Nolan was always the obvious choice to make a movie about Robert Oppenheimer.  As a director, Nolan has spent most of his career making movies with puzzle narratives.  I can think of no other director who could better relate to the man who solved the biggest puzzle of physics: how to harness atomic energy, the underlying power of the universe?  Given how simpatico Nolan is with his subject, it seems that it was only a matter of time when Nolan would make a movie about the father of the atomic bomb.

Once upon a time, in a quiet suburb in New Jersey, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) take their son Sammy to see his first movie.  He’s apprehensive about the experience, so they do their best to explain it to him.  For an engineer like Burt, movies are nothing more than a magic trick the   projector plays on your brain.  Mitzi, a classically trained pianist, says that movies are dreams that you remember.  Their views on movies, while worlds apart, are both correct.  Sammy didn’t realize it then, but he will spend the rest of his life reconciling the perspectives of his parents on his journey to becoming a Hollywood film director.

Describing classical music composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) as an overachiever is an understatement.  Having already achieved EGOT, she is also the lead conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic, a guest lecturer at Juilliard and the head of a foundation that provides opportunities for female conductors.  She’s also working on an autobiography and has begun practice for a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth symphony.  When the latter is complete, Lydia will have recorded all nine of Mahler’s symphonies with the same orchestra, equaling an achievement by her mentor Leonard Bernstein.