Allison Janney is one of my favorite actors. I’ve seen her in Juno, Ten Things I Hate About You and American Beauty, among a few other movies, but she’s probably still best known for playing the part of CJ Cregg in the television series The West Wing.

Janney enters an early scene in Margaret dragging a shopping basket across a busy New York city street when a bus runs a red light and squashes her like a bug. She and Anna Panquin share a few emotionally wrenching minutes as Janney utters her only lines in the movie, and that’s all Allison Janney gets to do.

Full disclosure: I walked out of Margaret after nearly two hours. Maybe Janney shows up as a ghost or a memory or maybe a voice-over at the end, I don’t know. And I didn’t care enough to find out.

The death of Janney’s character might have been something for Panquin’s character to focus on, maybe even grow from. To judge from the muddle has she makes of all her friendships, she doesn’t. She remains a hyper-dramatic, self-absorbed princess, blaming everyone around her for being insensitive to the magnitude of the death she’s witnessed even while she very oddly never acknowledges the heavy responsibility she shared in causing that death by distracting the bus driver. Again: Maybe the scales were lifted from her eyes in the end and she realized all this. Still don’t care.

That’s the problem this movie has: After the horrific event Panquin’s character experiences, it doesn’t seem to change her at all. Smeared with blood, she steps into a shower, washes it off, and resumes her life. She snorts coke with a scuzzball in the bathroom at a party, but apparently not to relieve emotional suffering, just to snort coke. She calls the scuzzball out of the blue, asks him if he’d like to “remove her virginity,” and they rather awkwardly go through it with, but it’s not desperate or revelatory, it’s ordinary. Nothing you’d want to watch. Pointless, I thought.

There’s no apparent reason for a lot of the scenes in Margaret. It looks like a movie before it’s been edited. And I realize I say this as a viewer who walked out before what could have been a resolution, but really, when I’ve been sitting through two hours of film time and all I can think of is, How much longer can this possibly go on? At that point, why should I care?