The introduction of the populist leader Jim Bowie Jason Patricc), sporting a knife as big as his ego, as the nemesis of the priggish young martinet Lt. Col. William Travis Patrick Wilsonn) doesn't enliven the proceedings.
She's one of the Hollywood performers who brings a remarkable spontaneity and personal presence to the screen; the force of her character doesn't merely enliven her roles but breaks through them.
Otherwise, the one fresh idea - of making Prospero a female character named Prospera (played by Helen Mirren) - doesn't enlighten or enliven.
A restaurant that does not smell of food or cooking cannot spark and enliven all the senses the way a restaurant brimming with the aromas of a kitchen can.
This underlying seriousness does not mean that Mr. Lowenstein lacks an ear for the howlers that enliven this woefully unfunny comedy of errors.
(Patrick Stewart, no slouch as a Shakespearean, failed to enliven a flaccid recent West End revival.) While you can sense Mr. Naughton laboring diligently to master the man's complexities, the effort does not pay off in a performance of the requisite intensity.
Mr. Obama's goal, it seems, was to indicate his continued willingness to serve in a job he believes he can do better than the other guy, but that doesn't really seem to energize or enliven him.
Shriver stumbles across provocative themes — the private erotic fantasies of long-time lovers, unplanned pregnancy in middle age, the sexuality of anger — but doesn't dwell on them long enough to enliven her characters or her story.
Almost all of the first episode and half of the second is exposition, and Lynch, who wrote them with Mark Frost (as he did the first two seasons), doesn't do much to disguise, adorn, or enliven it.
"The problem is embodied in the casting of Ms. Mitchell ('High Art'), a star of weighty film dramas who's good when tension, brittleness or fear are called for but doesn't appear to have the light touch that would help enliven scenes in which Marta adapts to her new role," he said.
