“French Exit” is worth seeing because it gives a juicy role to Michelle Pfeiffer, who is something to marvel at.But it’s a frustrating film because, as a whole, it’s justnot nearly as good as its central performance.

Pfeiffer plays Frances, a widowed Manhattan socialite who, in the first minutes of the movie, finds out that she has run out of money. Her accountant, who has been warning her of this for years, asks her why she never listened to him. Well, her plan, she tells him, was to die before the money ran out.

Pfeiffer’s response is the first of many linesto savor. In this moment, she’s sad, embarrassed, amused, confiding, horrified — it’s many emotions at once, and it’s indicative of what Pfeiffer consistently does over the course of the movie. Pfeiffer plays a woman who is mannered and self-protective. She also has a volcano inside her, but she is never going to show it. Still, every few minutes, something bubbles up and breaks through.

That’s one way to watch and enjoy “French Exit,” which is out in theaters Friday, April 2. You can concentrate on the big Pfeiffer moments and hop from one to the next, until you ultimately make your way to the end of the movie. If you do that, you will get everything there is to get from the film, without minding much that the story is something of a dead end.

In any case, through sales of her artwork and other possessions, Frances is able to get some money to live on, and Joan — an amazingly generous friend, played by Susan Coyne — gives Frances and her grown son (Lucas Hedges) an apartment in Paris to use indefinitely.

By normal human standards, things don’t look so bad. But the enigmatic Frances says that she plans to kill herself when the money runs out. And she must be anxious to kill herself, because she keeps giving money away (100-euro tips on a cup of espresso, hundreds of euros to a homeless guy, thousands of euros to another homeless guy).

Written by Patrick deWitt and based on his novel of the same name, “French Exit” needed an extra turn, some other element, perhaps what’s called “a third act.” In a novel, this might not have been necessary, because in a novel the reader is privy to the thoughts of the characters. But here, we keep waiting for the story to move forward.

It never does, but instead moves laterally. There’s a psychic. There’s a cat that might contain the spirit of Frances’ dead husband. There’s a diffident, hard-drinking widow (Valerie Mahaffey) whowants to be friends with Frances. And there are difficulties in the son’s on-again, off-again romance with his fiancee (Imogen Poots).

The audience wants to know about Frances, and instead it gets the zany cast of characters. It’s like going to see “Hamlet” and getting 20 minutes on Osric. It’s cute, it’s fine, but who cares?

Maybe the fault is withPfeiffer．也许导演阿扎赛尔雅各布斯无法控制嗨s lead actress. Maybe “French Exit” was supposed to be a light, supernatural comedy, andPfeifferdestabilized the whole enterprise by acting as if in a tragedy.

All of that is entirely possible, but it doesn’t change the fact that Pfeiffer is the best thing about “French Exit” and the only reason to see it.

L“French Exit”:Comedy drama. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges. Directed by Azazel Jacobs. (R. 110 minutes.) In Bay Area theaters Friday, April 2.