Word: quiet
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...learning how to treat people. That's a lesson Jenny must take at school - not so much from her starchy headmistress (Emma Thompson) as from her home-room teacher. Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) is one of those quiet beauties who dress severely, perhaps to punish the world for not noticing their loveliness. In an American movie about high school she would pull out her hairpins and do a pole dance; here she's the voice of maternal reason. Jenny's romance with David has deepened, and she has started telling off her superiors, recklessly burning academic bridges she might need...
...ride. Sarsgaard, a stalwart of Amer-indie films (Kinsey, Elegy, Jarhead) who as Trigorin was also Mulligan's love interest in The Seagull, easily inhabits David, making him a creature of charm and mystery. The smaller roles are nicely filled out as well, including Cara Seymour as Jenny's quiet mother and Matthew Beard as a gauche student whose dreams of dating a precocious teen Jenny and Jack keep smashing...
...award, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that he wasn't. But that word humbled is an interesting one to think about. Humility is a virtue - except when it isn't. We think of it as one of the attributes that make up a certain quiet acceptance of one's lot, even saintliness - think of Pope John XXIII. At the same time, what the books call false humility - the act of constantly saying that one is not worthy, a not-so-subtle way of provoking someone else to exclaim, "Oh! But you are!" - is one of the most...
...others for its policies. Sounded great. But Bush's commitment to be an international shrinking violet did not survive the terrorist attacks of 9/11, nor should it have. What the U.S. and the world wanted and needed in response to 9/11 was not (or, let's say, not just) quiet contemplation; it was noisy vitality. (See the top 10 Obama-backlash moments...
...words against nuclear-weapons proliferation with action to stop it; because he reminded Americans, with John Donne, that no man is an island and that poverty, despair and hunger anywhere diminish and indeed threaten those who are not poor, not hopeless and not hungry. Humility is fine, in the quiet of Obama's room, with his family, in private. But not in his public life - the life that he shares with all of us; the one to which we convey, for his allotted span as the most important political figure in the world, our aspirations for the future...