REVIEW: Butter

4/10 - I guess Butter carving sounds interesting. But it isn't. 

Butter is a great movie on paper. It's got a great cast, likely due to the great script. In fact, the script is so good it won a bunch of awards as a spec. On paper, it sounds like a fantastically funny, heartwarming, complex story.

As a movie it's pretty meh all around.

It's not politicial enough to be a biting satire. It's not funny enough to be a comedy. It doesn't follow through with it's attempts to be smart. This is a film overflowing with potential that falls flat on it's face.

As much as I love Jennifer Garner, and think she's actually quite funny in the role, it's the wrong casting. Her character is a larger than life scheming southern belle, who's hunger for power has corrupted all morals. Jen's southern accent wafts in and out, and is just too unlikable.

Somehow that's representative of all that goes wrong with this movie. The choices made in the production of this movie weren't necessarily wrong, but they weren't big and bold enough. Everything feels a little wishy washy. I have a suspicion that a lot of the smaller story lines were neutered to make room for the main story.

For example, Olivia Wilde's character Brook is a stripper. She seduces the home grown and wholesome Bob Pickler in a moment of weakness. Then she stalks him for the rest of the movie, demanding her money. In order to extort the money, Brook joins the butter carving competition. As interesting of a monkey wrench as she is, her character just collapses upon itself by the second half of the movie. Her paper thin character has no where to go so she disappears.

At best, Brook is intended to be a foil for Laura. Brook comes from nothing, and is able to make the moral choice in the end with every reason not to. Laura is privileged, and makes awful decisions. But it's a totally ineffective comparison because they have no business being in the same movie together. Their story lines don't ever meet or impact each other in any significant way.

What's frustrating is that the setup is there for so many great potential story lines, but practically all of them dwindle away into nothing. Without any follow through the movie is nothing but a drag.


There are some great moments that I can appreciate as a writer. When the signups are happening for the butter carving competition, there is a long rope maze of an entrance way. As each character enters the room to sign up, they tackle the rope maze a different way. It's a subtle detail, and I find it delicious to reveal character that way. Unfortunately the one thing that scene doesn't do is make me laugh.

Butter is a good movie if you want to see what goes wrong in a script from page to screen. It's not enough to rely on selling points like big characters and an unusual setting. Without a worthwhile story, and maybe even more importantly, without jokes this movie is a big miss.


IMDb - Butter (6,3)
Wikipedia - Butter 
Rotten Tomatoes - Butter (33%)
Amazon.ca - Butter