Flawless McDormand brings 'Olive Kitteridge' to life

Nice is overrated.

That's one takeaway from Olive Kitteridge (HBO, Sunday and Monday at 9 ET/PT, **** out of four), a quietly captivating miniseries about a seldom-quiet woman. The other is that overrating France McDormand is impossible. With this full-bodied, honestly sympathetic portrait of the difficult, demanding, and ultimately admirable Olive, she reaffirms her status as one of the great actors of our age — one who can lift your spirits, break your heart, and keep you riveted through all four hours of the best movie or miniseries HBO has produced since 2010's Temple Grandin.

With her every scene in this two-part film, beautifully directed by Lisa Cholodenko and ingeniously constructed by Jane Anderson out of Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning short stories, McDormand shows us another facet of Olive, until we're left with a portrait of a woman in full. The more you see of her, the more you want to see, in a film that — unlike so many on TV these days — seems precisely as long as it should be, without a moment wasted or another moment needed.

In a medium still drawn to easily "likable" characters, Olive isn't. A flinty Maine math teacher with a sharp wit and no social graces, Olive is smarter than most everyone around her, and yet not smart enough to see, or stop, the damage she does to those she loves. What her loved ones most often get is a taskmaster who believes in stating facts as she sees them; whose go-to bit of advice is "snap out of it" and go-to insult is "sap."

That last one is often aimed at her husband Henry (Richard Jenkins), a kind man whose kindness Olive finds smothering. We watch them battle and reconcile over a quarter of a century, and it's a tribute to both McDormand and Jenkins that at the end, we're not sure who had the better side in the argument.

To an extent, the same can be said for Olive and her son Christopher (Devin Druid as a teenager, The Newsroom's John Gallagher Jr. as an adult). Olive berates him and pushes him — and pushes him away, out of fear that he will inherit the depression that caused her father to kill himself. And yet she clearly loves him, so much so that he's one of the few people who can shake her resolve or make her cry.

So we follow Olive as she ages from 45 to 70, through moments when she is not as kind as she should be, and moments when she is better, and more astute, than people expect her to be. Anger and fear sometimes get the better of her, but she never wallows, and she never loses her mordant wit. Who else but Olive, when asked by a grieving widower (Bill Murray, brilliant in a small but vital role) for a reason to get up in the morning, would answer "Don't have a clue. I'm waiting for the dog to die so I can shoot myself."

You have to love a woman like that, and you certainly have to love McDormand, an actor in her prime with an Oscar and Tony already to her credit. Don't be shocked if, come September, she adds an Emmy to that list.

And that would be very nice, indeed.