Word: patricians
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...contests with an uncertain outcome and a huge national audience. This is the setting for Gore Vidal's "The Best Man," written 40 years ago yet still remarkably timely in its Broadway revival. Fighting for their party's presidential nomination are Secretary of State William Russell, a high-minded patrician liberal who believes politics is a process of educating people about the issues, and Senator Joe Cantwell, an expert at grabbing headlines with sensational investigations who will go to any length to win. He threatens to destroy Russell by releasing his medical records. Russell's team has dug up some...
TIME: So let's start with your grandfather Prescott Bush. He was a patrician Connecticut banker and Senator, part of the old-line Yankee Wasp establishment...
...ideas coincided with a time when such power was most needed. Einstein came to America in 1933 as the most celebrated of a distinguished group of European intellectuals, refugees from Hitler and Mussolini, who, as soon as they arrived, changed the composition of university faculties (largely from patrician to Jewish), and who also changed the composition of government. Until F.D.R.'s New Deal, the country had never associated the contemplative life with governmental action. Now there was a Brain Trust; being an "egghead" was useful, admirable, even sexy. One saw that it was possible to outthink the enemy. Einstein wrote...
...streetwise in Good Will Hunting. Here, though, he is a plodder. Pasty white among the bronze gods of Mongibello, striding stiffly, with nerdy glasses adorning his pinched face, Damon could more easily be mistaken for the creepy losers Hoffman usually plays (in Boogie Nights or Happiness) than for a patrician hunk like Dickie. The deglamorizing of Ripley pays off beautifully in his final meeting with Freddie, who sees through Tom's sham, quickly spotting the poseur's lapses of taste and showing a delicious upper-class contempt for a real nobody trying to be a fake somebody...
...TALENTED MR. RIPLEY Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) would rather "be a fake somebody than a real nobody." So he pursues a fatal game of pretense in Anthony Minghella's devious twist on the Patricia Highsmith crime novel about patrician indolence and underclass yearning. In a handsome cast, no one can touch Jude Law for golden gorgeousness with an undercoat of sadism...