Word: milquetoast
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Womack was a quiet former Harvard library employee. He sounds a lot like a frustrated milquetoast, Harvard's answer to the "crazed post office worker": peaceful and content on the outside, raging and disturbed within...
...live-in boyfriend, to the contrived quarrel with her new paramour a few moments before the finale, her angst always outshouts her charm. A third goof was to have Short start out really neurotic, as Richard Dreyfuss was in his Oscar-winning film portrayal, but turn into Caspar Milquetoast (or Ed Grimley) within minutes. The domestic frictions that made the film funny simply disappear...
Coppola skillfully plays his actors off of the typecasts we've come to expect of them. For instance, Dracula seems all the more seductive for the fact that Keanu Reeves, the would-be romantic lead, is such a milquetoast. Ryder, after whetting our appetites in "Beetle-juice" and "Heathers," is the vamp we've always wanted her to be. And Anthony Hopkins, who claims not to have brought Hannibal Lecter to bear on his role as Dracula's off-kilter nemesis Dr. Van Helsing, nevertheless gives us a few sparkling moments of Lecteresque macabre humor...
...Marseillaise revisionists claim that they are particularly offended by Rouget de Lisle's xenophobic reference to standards encrusted in the blood of retreating foreigners -- an image, ironically, that members of the ultra-right National Front must actually find quite appealing. But less ideological traditionalists are now rallying against the Milquetoast meddlers, denouncing the notion of tampering with the song that rang through the torchlit streets of revolutionary France as nothing short of traitorous. Sure, the Marseillaise "is ridiculous," concedes novelist Michel Tournier, "but we should leave it alone because, like old furniture, it gains in value over the years...
Bessie, the care giver, connects tenderly with her harsher sister's teenage sons, one a powder keg of anger who burned down his neighborhood, the other a bespectacled Milquetoast who perpetually retreats into a book. She also has a wonderful speech recalling her only romantic love, a carnival worker who drowned before her eyes when a partying crowd onshore mistook his desperate pleas for habitual clowning. Amid the grim reality, McPherson's characters take childlike delight in simple things and maintain a giggly sense of humor. Bessie's father Marvin, unseen but for his shadow through a glass-brick wall...