Thomas gives her a diamond-hard veneer, until the viewer is convinced that she's willing to do whatever is necessary for her own benefit.
And yet, for all its hard-luck veneer, Lithgow is as proud, as captivated, and as unabashedly excited about the Olympics as Sydney.
What she has achieved, however, is no more than the hard-bitten veneer of a girl who knows she is out in the open and surrounded by possible harm.
In a rare crack of the hard-cookie veneer she strives to display, she let slip at a meeting with New York media reporters in the summer that she did fret as to how she might do in her new job.
Topped by a gruffly appealing Kevin Costner as a good ole drunk whose vote will decide the American presidency, it takes place in the kind of New Mexico town that might once have been thought of as Capraesque, but in depressed spirit and hard-times veneer comes across like a Dust Bowl Hooverville.
While most of her Lady Jaguars teammates protected themselves with a hard, if fragile, veneer, using bravado to convey worldliness, Hannah wore a cloak of vulnerability.
And just as Mr. Cooper is moonlighting in the world of entertainment, Mr. Beck seems to be aiming for a veneer of hard news.
So this memoir includes an appreciative chapter about Ms. Coddington's working relationship with Ms. Wintour, about how much Ms. Wintour loves her children, works hard, maintains a steely veneer and so on.
While advanced brain imaging may add a veneer of hard science to the evaluation of people's impressions of political ads (front page, April 20), it seems to add very little in terms of hard data.
And there's this hard to break through veneer of words and frameworks and mathematics — but once you get through that, the concepts are actually really intuitive.
