What better low-key indie to review today (the night of the final presidential debate, which I will be writing about during and after it) than Butter, a movie that technically is about the obscure-passion of Iowa butter carving, but is really an allegory about Sarah Palin vs. Obama, and the clash of values between religious hypocrites and the arguably more moral secular liberals.
What Works: For those that don’t know, Butter deals with the battle of wits between a prim, ultra-conservative midwestern wife Laura Pickler (Jennifer Garner, in her most alive performance in years) and a black, adopted ten-year-old foster kid who is a true butter carving virtuoso. Various other characters (like Ty Burrell as Laura’s husband, Hugh Jackman as her ex-boyfriend and easy pawn, and, most unnecessarily, Olivia Wilde as a stripper Burrell becomes briefly entangled with but stalks him throughout the entire movie) get swept up in the battle.
This is an original and lively set-up for a satire, and the movie could have easily lampooned the whole butter-worshipping culture of conservative values…
What Doesn’t Work: The problem is that it really doesn’t. It’s a satire with a very specific target (Garner’s Laura Pickler), who is very obviously a parody of Sarah Palin, but isn’t that parody a little dated? Why is almost no other character really lampooned for laughs, and everyone else in the movie mostly nice? Why have a satire at all if you aren’t really going to go for the jugular on anything? And, seriously, what the fuck is Olivia Wilde even doing in this movie? [I find myself saying that about a lot of her characters lately.]
The problem with this movie all boils down to execution, because it is seriously off from the laughs in the first three quarters (which never snowball into hilarity like they should) to the sappy cop-out of an ending.
What I Would Have Done Differently: This movie has been sitting on the shelf for over a year waiting for a release. That’s a mistake. If they weren’t going to reshoot it and fix all of the execution problems, then they should have at least released it as soon as possible so people still gave a shit about Sarah Palin vs. Obama (a social conservative vs. “President Black Panther” struggle) instead of where the country is currently at, a Romney vs. Obama (plutocrat billionaire vs. “President Everyone is Equal” showdown) duel of ideals.