This film is an attempt to satirize the Obama/Hillary primaries but the infantile plot and host of clichéd characters never get beyond bad melodrama. There’s not one clever or even funny line and, by the time the curtain falls, the only thing Butter has managed to lampoon is its own stark failure to entertain.
Bob Pickler (Ty Burrell) has been the reigning Iowa butter carving champion for 15 years and, when he is asked to step aside to give someone else a chance, he agrees. Unfortunately for him, however, his wife Laura (Jennifer Garner) is furious. She relishes the reflected glory that Bob’s talent brings and, rather than retire gracefully, decides to enter the next butter carving competition herself. Meanwhile, Destiny (Yara Shahidi), the African American foster child of Julie and Ethan (Alicia Silverstone and Rob Corddry), discovers she has an amazing artistic talent of her own and becomes the contender Laura has to beat.
Laura is a one-dimensional baddie. She’s short-tempered, unreasonable, selfish and demanding and, with all this behavior so blatantly on show, she becomes nothing more than a caricature of the pushy wife everyone avoids at parties. Vague attempts are made to make ambition her driving force but, with no context to explain why her only life-achievement is being a side-kick for a husband she has distain for, and with her own goals set no higher than winning a butter-carving competition, these attempts fail.
As bad as Laura is, so Destiny is pure and good, but she makes her entrance long after Laura has set the tone and, instead of seeing this charismatic little girl through Laura’s eyes, the point of view switches by way of a voice-over from Destiny. This intimate commentary quickly beguiles but it also takes us into a different world and the story-telling is fatally fractured. Laura, of course, riles at the injustice of having to compete with this cute little orphan and, for once, she actually has a point.
Bob is the clichéd whipping-boy Laura emasculates at the same time she’s filing her nails but, incredibly, the scene when she catches him with a hooker is skipped over, obviously because we had already seen Laura at her worst and there was nowhere else for her to go. The inclusion of this storyline is clearly meant to symbolize the Bill/Hillary/Monica scenario, but the writer again doesn’t know where to take it and, when the hooker decides to join the butter-carving community, Laura quietly tolerates her presence. Really? After all that bossing around and yelling, she’s got nothing to say, even to the husband who has humiliated her in front of the entire town? Some ball-breaker she turned out to be.
RELEASE DATES AS AT JANUARY 2012
USA – 16 March 2012
Russia – 29 March 2012