Butter Review

Butter is a small budget film written by Jason A. Micallef and directed by Jim Field Smith. Butter is the story of a butter sculpting competition in Iowa where a young girl in foster care competes against the overly ambitious wife of a former 15-time Iowa state butter sculpting champion.

The movie has an all-star cast including Jennifer Garner, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Wilde, Ty Burrell, Alicia Silverstone, Rob Corddry and Ashley Greene. In Butter, Jennifer Garner is looking to parley her husband’s success carving butter into political success, but is derailed when her husband stops competing. Not willing to let things go, she decides to compete herself. Laura’s (Garner) dreams of the future are challenged by newcomer, Destiny; played well by Yara Shahidi, who has a talent for sculpting butter. Many of the funniest parts of the movie involve the side plots featuring a stripper played by Olivia Wilde. Silverstone and Corddry do well as Destiny’s foster parents.

Butter shows you several amazing sculptures made out of butter (my drawing above recreates on of the funniest, “the Scarlet Letter”).  The scene that I liked the best from the film is when Rob Corddry is sitting in the parking lot about to send Destiny in to sign up for a butter competition. They get into a fantastic conversation about how to deal with being nervous by imaging what is the worst thing that could happen when Destiny walks through that door (great parenting in my book).

Be warned, this movie is R rated – mainly for what the characters say and a couple of adult situations. It is worth your time and is available on DVD (I saw it on DVD from Netflix). Definitely worth spending 90 minutes to see – especially if you like the actors listed above. I give Butter three and a half Mick Happies. Here is the trailer for you to enjoy – it will give you a good sense of how the movie goes: