Soon, the "reminders" and "shout outs" to exercise good character became nearly meaningless.
At its worst it reads like a clever exercise in character and point of view.
That episode, however, merely provided the pretext for her ouster, for the triumph of a concerted exercise in character assassination.
Like the play, the film is an exercise in character exaltation that comes at the expense of any sort of illumination of Lombardi's technical proficiency.
But where Mr Madoff can only gain from such an exercise, the character inspired by Mr Wiesel feels diminished cartoonish and tainted.
It substitutes banality for analysis; it's "yet another genre of spectatorial appreciation, an exercise in character recognition, a reliable source of edification and pleasant uplift".
Its main exercise in character development involves two models competing to see which one can remove his leopard-print underwear without taking off his pants.
This is a harmful form of imitation that simply results in a clone and avoids a thoughtful and meaningful exercise in character building.
Ms. Christian, exercising her character's hard-won dignity, gets away with this.
Some of the other voices, however – particularly, it has to be said, female characters – never quite lose the air of exercises in character writing.
