Frances McDormand is the best thing about 'Three Billboards'

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a very good film, but not a great film. It seems to be unsure if wants to be plot-driven or a pure character study. There are some big laughs in the film, but just as many jarring, problematic shifts in tone. Frankly, I'm surprised that its rapturous reception because it's so deeply flawed.

I suppose a big reason it's been elevated is the central performance of Frances McDormand, an actress I've never seen give a bad performance, and here gets a long overdo opportunity to be front and center.

McDormand has been brilliant for years, with star turns in films like Blood Simple and Mississippi Burning, but for most mainstream moviegoers she didn't really 'arrive' until the 1996 Coen Brothers' classic Fargo.

It was an iconoclastic performance -- she memorably played a pregnant police officer who ties that whole movie's wild narrative together -- and it was decidedly not the kind of role that makes women movie stars.

Largely since then her meatiest parts have been in films by the Coen brothers (her husband is Joel Coen) and for the most part she has been relegated to supporting parts where she is always terrific but sadly underutilized.

In Three Billboards, there are a lot of striking character turns (I would argue a few too many), Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson in particular are standouts, but it feels, appropriately like the Frances McDormand show.

As the trailer (which is much more satisfying than the movie) demonstrates, McDormand comes in hot from the beginning of this narrative as a grieving mother trying to shame the police for failing to solve the case of her daughter's sexual assault and murder.

It's a very interesting hook for a movie but the execution frustrated me. As funny and lively as she is, the McDormand character is underwritten. We get a brief glimpse of her relationship with her daughter -- but not enough to fully grasp their bond. McDormand's character is so single-minded focused on revenge, that she seems to disregard all the facts and reality of her situation, and yet we are not meant to see her as delusional, but justified -- this is a movie that, at least on the surface, is oddly pro-violence. And in the last act there is a lot of business about teasing out someone who might be her daughter's killer that feels like something out of clunkier movie.

And yet, McDormand owns her role and her salty dialogue. She struts through this movie like the movie star she always should of been and deserves to be. And while nothing should be revolutionary about seeing a 60-year-old woman being the undeniable focal point of a major Oscar contender -- in which she is neither dying, wearing prosthetics or impersonating a famous figure -- in 2017 it is.

And while I don't think the film's cynical, crude tone and its asides on race always entirely work, it may just be a movie that speaks to the broken system psyche of America right now. I do love that amidst the recent outing of so many prominent sexually predatory men and the open looting of future generations by conservatives in Congress, that Frances McDormand could become the personification of our raging and righteous id.