But the droll tone cannot change the fact that the movie lacks a pay-off and I fear Dominik's ulterior motives and rarified intellectual sensibility is lost on a multiplex audience.
Comics like Chris Rock have used the dog as a jokey comic symbol for virility and penis size, and there is something of this droll sleight-of-hand in the fact that wimpy Gerry has the little terrier and tough old Harlan has the great lumbering, slobbering bloodhound.
The Private Eye photo caption (Diana, walking away from court, saying "I got custody of the quids") was enough to make a layman assume a victory for her lawyer, Anthony Julius; in fact, that is just the power of droll wordplay.
At the outset of the film, in a droll intertitle, he makes a playful comment on the fact that the shooting took place in a location far from where the events are depicted in the novel, because idyllic countryside has been replaced by concrete jungles.
In fact, it's classic Connolly, a 90-minute compendium of droll things other people have said and anecdotes culled from across his 50-year career in music, the movies and comedy.
The matter-of-fact description of farm life, peppered by Rosie's droll voice, makes it clear that eking out a living in rural 19th-century Illinois was hard and unending.
"He is the strong man of his party — full of wit, facts, dates — and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West," Douglas told a supporter.
In fact, it feels like one particular album: 69 Love Songs, the droll, arch triple CD by the Magnetic Fields.
Having arranged a good marriage for Tzeitel (Sally Murphy) with the town's widowed butcher, Tevye is poleaxed by the news that she won't marry the old man; in fact, she has pledged herself to the gangling, impecunious tailor, Motel (the droll John Cariani).
In fact, anybody hearing the Smog album "Wild Love," from 1995, would think Callahan droll.
