In his fiction, love doesn't triumph over class distinctions ("On Tangled Paths"), individual suffering inevitably yields to hard social and political realities ("The Poggenpuhls," "Effi Briest," "Cécile," "The Stechlin"), and climactic reconciliations don't quite take ("Irretrievable").
To be sure, it's not the type of picture that lingers, and obviously some of the sting-like-a-bee editing is a mercy to Ms. Zellweger, whose float-like-a-butterfly voice doesn't triumph over her my-left-foot dance skills.
Mr. Felder objects to what he calls "feminized" law, a more nuanced view of winning and losing: "Would you want a world where there's no wrong and right, where truth doesn't triumph over lies, where justice merges with inequity?
He did not triumph over apartheid by spending 27 years in prison and then cashing in his moral superiority.
Yet we should remember that the real-life Steve McQueen did not triumph over adversity like one of his movie characters.
She's said that, at times, her love for her kids didn't triumph over what others would think or say.
In the World of Tomorrow, apparently, the virtuous do not always prevail, and justice does not triumph decisively over evil.
Fascism doesn't triumph without help.
It does not march toward the inevitable triumph like most tributes to leading modern artists.
But if that's old news, the World Series this year contained within it a moral lesson, which is that while money certainly helps a team win the big prize, it doesn't always triumph over other elements in the game like pluck, desire and even luck — and this relates to the absence of either of the current New York teams in the event this year.
Insurgents did not triumph everywhere.
