Debra Winger is a likely best actress Oscar candidate for her role in "A Dangerous Woman," though the film is uneven and sometimes extremely frustrating.
But Winger is an unrecognizable marvel as Martha Horgan, who wears uncomfortably large glasses, white socks and clunky shoes, and is incapable of telling a lie. She's equally incapable of making a decision, no matter how simple it may seem to the rest of us — she even gets flustered at the question of "paper or plastic?" at the grocery store.
Martha lives with her glamorous aunt Frances (Barbara Hershey), who is impatient with her, even as she allows Martha to live in a small house at the back of her property in this small California town.
The film begins with a wild sequence that has the jealous and very drunk wife of a local assemblyman crashing her car through Frances' front porch. The wife accuses her husband of having an affair with Frances and has to be escorted home.
This scene quickly sets up both Frances and Martha's characters, and in their own ways both are unhappy misfits.
From this point, the focus is primarily on Martha, as we see her working in a local dry cleaning store and her conflicts with her co-workers and her awkwardness in various social situations.
The main plot kicks into gear, however, with the arrival of an itinerant, alcoholic handyman (Gabriel Byrne), who begins affairs with both Martha and Frances, predictably turning their lives upside-down.
Winger literally sinks herself into the role and becomes Martha, taking brave risks right and left to make the character more realistic than the warm-and-fuzzy tack that some other actresses might have wanted to take.
This is both the film's strength and an alienating weakness, however. While Winger dominates the picture and is fascinating to watch, how much sympathy her character engenders will likely be a very personal thing among audience members. By surrounding her with less sympathetic characters, producer-writer Naomi Foner ("Violets Are Blue," "Running On Empty") and director Stephen Gyllenhaal ("Waterland," "Twin Peaks") help the situation, though there are places in the film where the audience may simply wish all of these people would just go away.
Still, there is enough here to pull in the art house crowd, and Winger's performance alone is worth the price of the ticket.
"A Dangerous Woman" is rated R for violence, profanity, sex and nudity.