Frances McDormand is certainly one of our finest actors. She is incapable of a mediocre or thoughtless performance. And in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri she delivers with both barrels, an apt metaphor given the violence of the film.

However, she was better in Fargo. She was better in Mississippi Burning. And while she creates an angry working class female hellbent on justice—the distaff equivalent of Charles Bronson’s angry working class male hellbent on justice—I found the character as written and directed by Martin McDonagh, to be a cheap stereotype relying upon expletives to convey depth of rage.

The overload of foul language struck me as way out of line. The point was made early on. We get it. These folks in Ebbing Missouri, from the racist cop Dickson (Sam Rockwell in an Oscar-winning performance) to the loving son of McDormand’s Mildred Hayes (played by Lucas Hedges) all spend a lot of time using the worst words in the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The very worst. But is it really necessary for the director to have them using these words in such quantities that we soon realize the F-word, the N-word, and the C-word are standing in for intelligently sculpted scenes of grief, poetic moments of emotion, and soaring diatribes of alienation and outrage?

I was shocked to hear the language a great actor like McDormand was required to spew simply to convince us that finally here was a feminist equivalent to an X-rated Lear.

McDonagh fails to realize this magic realist tale in other ways. It is inexcusably corny. The deer that comes to “visit” the grieving mother at one of the billboards.  The scenes with her ex-husband and his new teenage girlfriend. Cinematic Thomas Kinkade. The voice-over we hear from Woody Harrelson’s deceased character, the cop with the heart of gold who dispenses bromides to various characters—redneck deus ex machina. A cheap trick.

Rockwell was pulverizing in a performance that seems to have divided critics and viewers. As the slow-witted, quick-fisted, racist cop who lives with his mom, he is an original creation, one that Rockwell inhabits like a tougher, younger Christian Bale. But there are those who now discredit his Oscar nomination simply because they deplore the character he portrays.

Hey! that’s why it’s called “make-believe.” It’s a movie. A cinematic fable, intended to shine light on the way we live in the real world. Don’t blame the messenger.

And yes, Frances McDormand will probably win the Oscar for her fearless performance.